


Twelve Days of Barton

by MsMockingbird



Series: The Mockingverse [3]
Category: Avengers (Comics), Hawkeye (Comics), Mockingbird - Fandom, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Headcanon, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Marriage, Origin Story, Past Mind Control, Rough Sex, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-02 09:54:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 12
Words: 48,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2808242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MsMockingbird/pseuds/MsMockingbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawkeye brings home his blushing new bride to the Avengers tower and the rest of the team isn't really sure what to make of her. </p><p>Twelve Chapters -- any of which could contain some mild violence or explict sexy times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Enter the Birds, Stage Left

**Author's Note:**

> This is a mash-up of elements from the Marvel-616 comics universe origin of Hawkeye and Mockingbird (meeting through Crossfire) and the MCU canon--with a slight tweak on some of Bobbi's history to accomodate the very different aspects of SHIELD from each universe.
> 
> It's obviously set after "Captain America: Winter Soldier" but without referencing "Agents of SHIELD", since this is a very different Bobbi than theirs (though the AOS Mockingbird is wonderful and very true to the heart of the character).
> 
> And despite the title, this isn't a Christmas story. It'd be happening sometime in the end of the summer, about two years after "Winter Soldier".
> 
> I have no ownership over any of these characters or settings.

The popcorn for movie night was being doused with butter with the Avengers realized no one had seen or heard from Clint in over a day. Calls to his cell went unanswered, he hadn't taken one of the GPS equipped vehicles and Natasha was disavowing any knowledge of his whereabouts. 

Then Tony had the bright idea of asking JARVIS if he'd heard from the archer.

"Yes, sir. Approximately an hour ago he called from the steps of the courthouse and asked me to insert some paperwork into the New York Vital Statistics database."

"Uh," Bruce Banner interjected quietly. "Did anyone else hear that ominous music start playing?"

Steve Rogers looked around the room and met Natasha Romanoff's eyes. "Any idea?"

"No." Her pale smooth brow furrowed. "Not a clue...it might be for a private mission."

"JARVIS, what kind of paperwork?" Tony waved the rest of them quiet.

"A marriage license, sir."

*****

They all heard the door to the main elevator slide open, then two voices whispering in the still darkness that enveloped the common floor of the Tower.

"Don't you live here?" A woman's voice, low and soft with a hint of mocking good humor.

"Yeah." Hawkeye sounded edgy but almost...high. Like he was trying not to giggle.

"So why are we sneaking in?" The woman was openly laughing now, sounding nearly as giddy as the man.

"Because I'd like to get you into the Nest before anyone sees you...forgiveness, permission, you know the routine."

"And the only elevator to the private floors is that one?"

"Yeah, so hop to it, little bird." There was a sound like a quick slap, accompanied by a shocked giggle from the women. 

Two shadowy figures crossed into view in the hallway outside the living room. By pre arranged signal, JARVIS flipped on the lights in the living room.

Framed in the doorway was Clint Barton in his tactical gear, bow slung over his back. Just behind him stood a tall woman with golden hair in a long black trench coat and her own tactical gear in black and white. 

Without even glancing to his right, where the Avengers all stood in various judgmental poses, Clint reached back and grabbed the woman's hand.

"Change of plans, sprint for the elevator, don't look back. They can smell fear."

"Hawkeye." 

One word. That was all Steve Rogers, Captain America, needed to freeze the archer in his place. 

The woman though...she was apparently immune to the living legend's aura because she squeezed Hawkeye's hand, released it and turned to smile at the team.

"Uh, Hi, Avengers." She waved at them tentatively.

Hawkeye spun on one heel and deliberately wrapped one long arm around her shoulder. It was a gesture of pure possession.

Mine. He might as well have shouted it.

"So, this is the blushing bride, Barton?" Tony Stark said casually.

"How do you...damn it JARVIS. I asked you not to say anything," Hawkeye snapped angrily.

"Don't blame him, he kept it quiet. But he can't lie to me."

"You care to explain yourself here, Hawkeye? Where have you been for the last forty eight hours and who the heck is she?" Steve's voice was cold but steady.

Clint shot him a look of pure venom. "Don't talk about my wife like that, Steve," he bristled.

"Clint, you're married? For real?" Natasha's voice was tight with some emotion that no one in the room wanted to examine.

Now for the first time, Clint looked a little abashed. "Uh, well, yeah, Nat. I mean we played fast and loose with the paperwork but it's valid. Just didn't want to wait 24 hours."

Through the whole exchange, the woman was studying the tribunal ranged against her, her eyes shrewd and intelligent. She seemed to like Thor the most at first glance; he was certainly the least concerned about her being there from his admiring grin. 

Bruce was watching both of them intently, his gentle calm face creased with concern. 

"Hey, have the two of you been in a fight?" He interrupted Steve's renewed admonishments abruptly.

"Well, kinda, yeah," said Hawkeye.

Now that he mentioned it, the rest of them could see the marks of violence on them both. 

The woman's body suit was ripped in several places under her jacket, bare skin flush with red welts and cuts. Her hair was bloody and there were deep bruise marks on her neck.  
Hawkeye had a track of dried blood trailing from one ear, bruises on his neck as well and his hands were cut and raw.

"What the hell have you been doing Barton?" Tony almost sounded admiring.

"Bartons." The woman looked at each of them directly. "It's Bartons now." Her voice was calm and firm and she turned into Hawkeye as she said it, pressing her body into his. His whole demeanor changed, going yielding and attentive. 

Across the room, Natasha Romanoff jerked a little, as though she had been stung by a bee.

"We were in New Jersey, and we kinda got into a fight with each other," Hawkeye explained a little distractedly. 

"Total mis-understanding," the woman interjected. "But after that we were being chased around by a bunch of thugs for a day or so, and then we were back in New Jersey and we fought each other again--"

"That time was because we were forced," Hawkeye offered in a sort of "of course" voice.

"Then we fought the guy who'd been making us fight each other, and a bunch of his thugs and beat them and then, well, then we got married." She smiled at them all brightly and ducked her head into Hawkeye's chest.

"So you met...two days ago?" Steve grabbed at that detail like he was grabbing for the last helicopter out of Saigon. 

"Little less, yeah, sport," the woman confirmed in a muffled voice.

"And in all that you didn't think to call us for help or anything?" Tony said in a wondering voice.

"Actually, we couldn't. Crossfire kept locking in on us whenever we tried to call for help and it almost got a bunch of civilians killed. We had to improvise." Hawkeye looked up from where he was nuzzling the woman's blond hair.

"Right." Bruce cut in again in firmly. "As much as I'd love to stand and listen to two grown adults being scolded like kids, I can see from here that cut on your wife's shoulder needs stitches. Infirmary, now."

"Bobbi." The blond woman looked up at him with a grateful, shy smile. "My name's Bobbi. Bobbi Barton." She laughed suddenly. It was a nice sound, infectious and lively. "I'm alliterative now."

"What were you before?" Steve asked sharply as Bruce lead the pair down the hall to the elevators. 

"Alone, Captain. I was alone." Her voice was quiet but clear as the door slide shut behind the three of them.

Natasha made a sharp "ah-ha" noise. The rest of them looked at her. 

"I thought I knew her from somewhere. She's ex-SHIELD, her name's...was...Morse. Barbara Morse, Agent 19, also called Mockingbird. She was on the short list for the Avengers Initiative till two years ago."

"What happened?" Steve said intently.

Natasha gave him a worried look. "No one knew. She literally dropped off the system. I'd gone looking for her contact info at one point--she's one of the highest rated agents in history and I wanted to bring her in on something. And she was just gone. From everything. Fury implied she'd been killed on an Op; then right after the whole debacle with Pierce I found evidence Fury'd been planning to arrest her."

"For what?"

"Treason."

When they all boiled through the door to the infirmary--five stories up on the research levels--Banner was swiping disinfectant over the long deep cut on Mockingbird's shoulder while she winced. 

Clint looked up at the clock and cursed.

"Four minutes, forty three seconds, would it have killed you all to take the stairs?" 

"Heh...ow...you owe me fifty...ow...bucks, sport." 

Captain America and Black Widow both stopped short and stared at them. Tony, followed at a more leisurely pace by Thor who only seemed to be coming along for the comedy potential, nodded slowly.

"Hey, Nat, maybe you shoulda remembered just how much Fury lies," said the billionaire. 

Minutes later, while Captain America glared at the blond woman and Banner proceeded to set a row of neat stitches into that impressive wound, Black Widow looked up from her smartphone.

"All he'll say is 'She was working for me. And I thought she was a traitor till last night.'. You are such an asshole, Nick." The last was directed at her phone, almost fondly.

Bobbi glanced at Clint, who was holding her hand and looking critically at Banner's work. "I guess he didn't take my suggestion seriously," she murmured.

"Suggestion?" asked Tony.

"After I sent him proof I wasn't a traitor, he offered me my old job back, in Europe, with his little makeshift operation. And I kinda..." She winced. "Well, I kinda told him to take the offer, and his eyepatch and cram them both--"

"We get the picture," snapped Steve. "Look, you two had better damn well explain yourselves."

Hawkeye straightened up and turned to the super soldier. "All due respect Cap, go cram it yourself. We've both been awake for about two days, haven't really eaten. We've been beaten up, mind-controlled, shot at, stabbed, chased around the city and threatened. I've got a popped ear drum and two dislocated fingers; Bobbi's got cracked ribs and a loose tooth. Oh, and it's our wedding night."

"Yeah," Bobbi cut in. "You deserve an explanation but frankly right at the moment the only thing I'm interested in debriefing is him." She jerked a thumb at Clint, who grinned so broadly you could see all his teeth.

"Mind controlled?" Tony moved past Steve and started to casually hand Banner liquid bandage and topical analgesic. 

"Sorta kinda." Bobbi nodded. "Crossfire had this experimental tech, uses sound waves to trigger emotional states. He used it to make us go berserker and beat each other up."  
Clint dropped a soft kiss onto her forehead. "Lucky for us you're tougher mentally than I am."

She responded by planting a smack on his neck. "I couldn't have thrown that baton hard enough to break that glass. Without you, we'd both be toast."

Bobbi leaned her head against his chest, sighing, then dug into one of the pockets of her trenchcoat, lying behind Hawkeye on the table. "Here, Romanoff." A USB data stick flew through the air between them, to be caught deftly. "Give us a day or two before the interrogation--and give yourself time to look at that."

"What is it?" The Black Widow held the storage device in her fingertips as though afraid it would explode. 

"Me. My life for the last three years, everything I could collect and record. Where I've been, what I've been doing, the whole paper trail that lead me to Crosstech on the same glorious night Hawkeye decided to visit the place that makes his arrows."

"Why did you even have this?" Nat said suspiciously. 

Mockingbird shrugged a little. "Frankly, I thought I was about to leave a beautiful corpse. I was hoping someone in law enforcement would find it and...exonerate me. Or I'd become conspiracy fodder, either was okay."

"Oh, shit," Hawkeye exclaimed. "I'm going to need a new supplier now."

"It's just the carbon fibre shafts, right? You make the arrow heads in house?"

"Hmm, yeah."

"Oh, I can source that for you. I know some people." Bobbi smiled happily at her husband, then frowned. "Or I did before my life blew up."

"We'll work it out," Hawkeye tucked his hand under her chin and lifted it up a little.

Despite Steve and Natasha still glaring at them, despite Bruce and Tony still working on their wounds, despite Thor leaning on the doorway and almost laughing, the Bartons looked at each other as though they were the only people on the planet.

*****

Later, patched and stitched and bandaged, Hawkeye and Mockingbird ditched the rest of the Avengers at the door of the Nest and shared a quick meal of apples and cheese.  
Clint showed Bobbi the master bathroom and left her alone to commune with the jetted soaker tub while he showered and shaved in the spare.

When he emerged in boxer shorts, the only light in the bedroom came from the open bathroom door. It was silent in there and Clint looked around in confusion. The bed was flat, empty. He'd walked through the apartment to get here so she hadn't passed him. Where was she?

"Uh, Clint?" Bobbi's voice from the bathroom was tiny, scared. "D-d-do you have anything I can wear?"

He did a double take in silence. "Um, what do you mean?"

"I don't h-have any clothes, I realized. My uniform is filthy, I threw away my underwear because gross and I d-don't have anything to p-p-p-put on." Her voice was filled with tears and he nearly charged into the bathroom to hold her.

But something held him back. If she'd wanted to see him, she'd be out here in the bedroom. He blinked then turned to his closet and started to rummage through the shirts.  
"Hang on...though...just wondering...um, why do you need something to wear? We are married and, well, I've seen you topless."

The frustrated noise from the bathroom at least sounded more like the Bobbi he knew. "It's just...Rogers was right, we've known each other for like t-t-two days and I want to see you and I want you to see me but I'm...I'm scared Clint. W-w-walking out there with no clothes on, I'll feel naked."

He knew, suddenly, what she was feeling. He could remember what it felt like to have all your defenses ripped away. She just needed one layer between herself and the world, at least at first. Clint paused, his hand on a bunch of cotton fabric. If she didn't want to have sex tonight, he'd have to go away and take care of things on his own but he'd be...okay with it. Wow. That was not a thought that had ever occurred to him. He'd be willing to wait for this one. For his little bird.

Clint tasted that phrase on his tongue and smiled. "Here, little bird. Will this do?" He stuck his hand around the door frame and let the item in his hand unfold and hang. 

"Wow. Yeah. That's kinda perfect." 

It was snatched out his hand. Clint grinned and tapped one bedside light up to medium, then turned away from the door of the bathroom. He wanted this to be a vision.

The bathroom light clicked off and he heard her step into the room. A wave of damp air slid over him, carrying the scent of soap and warm clean woman. She smelled like fresh berries and cream.

Clint turned and looked at his wife, bathed in the soft glow of the light, wearing a white dress shirt of his that came down to mid-thigh on her powerful legs. She stood tall and strong, cotton resting on her rich curves and sliding across her cleavage. Her blond hair was clean and fluffed, her face was dewy and she looked about ten years younger than he knew she was. The expression in her eyes was half-proud and half-terrified.

His boxer shorts got tight and he winced. "I see why that look's so popular in movies."

She blinked and grinned sharply. "I should go cook you a steak dressed like this."

"Oh, little bird, I'm really not interested in food right now." He tried to sound casual but the pain in his groin put a certain strain in the tone. He stared at her, more than a little concerned he'd scared her.

She tilted her head, just like a bird, and nodded. "Me, neither. Gorgeous men with great arms and no shirt kinda take away my appetite. For food."

Clint stepped forward and rested his hand on her cheek, her skin warm and soft. "You okay? I don't want to do anything if you're not okay."

She snorted, and grabbed his hips, pulling him into her until they were skin to fabric. "Oh, shut up and kiss me."

"Well, that's just the best thing I've heard in years," Clint grinned as he tucked one big hand into the soft fall of her freshly washed hair and kissed his wife for what he realized was the first time.

She sort of fell forward to mash herself against him, tucking her arms under his to hug him as close as she could, the cotton of the shirt bunching and riding up her thighs.

She tasted of sugar and salt, her lips almost creamy in texture. Her face was wet, he thought from her bath, and then he knew it was tears. Clint drew back and looked down at her, not far because she was nearly as tall as he was.

"I'm doing it wrong?"

"No." Bobbi gulped and smiled at him. "This is just way too right. I feel safe. I haven't been safe in...forever."

"I'll keep you safe, if you'll let me."

"We can keep each other safe, sport. As long as we can."

"Oh, little bird, I ain't never letting you go."


	2. Natasha Takes Charge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha dosen't really trust anybody, but she can learn to distrust a little less. 
> 
> Shopping helps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always thought, once they worked out the 'Are you in love with Clint?' issue, that Mockingbird and Black Widow would be good friends.
> 
> It's a start.

At three PM on the second day Bobbi Barton spent in Avengers tower, she walked out the garage door, pulled one of Clint's old motorcycle jackets tighter around her torso and set off towards midtown east at a determined pace.

Hawkeye was out with Captain America on patrol, and already texting Natasha things like: 'If I kill him, you'll help me bury the body, right?' and 'One shot to the throat and at least he'll shut up'.

She had turned her phone to silent, which helped as she tailed Bobbi across the city to a storage facility on the waterfront. The blond walked straight in and took the elevator to the top floor. Natasha went to the next building over, pulled out a miniature parabolic mike and non-reflective binoculars and took up position on the roof. Through the window at the end of the corridor, she saw Bobbi stop at a large storage unit about three quarters of the way down the corridor, look from side to side, unlock a man-door in the larger one and step inside. The mike picked up the sound of her footsteps and then nothing.

Natasha's phone 'rang', a more extended buzz than a text message. She glanced down, expecting to see Clint or Steve's number. It was 'Unknown'. Probably a telemarketer. She ignored it. 

Still nothing from inside the storage unit; some sounds like footsteps but no one came into view in the hallway. 

Her phone rang again. 'Unknown' again. She ignored it, again.

Movement inside and Bobbi stepped back into the hallway...

...looked out the window directly at her and raised her phone to her ear.

Natasha's cell rang again. Bobbi pulled her phone away from he face, pointed at it, then pointed at Nat. Black Widow answered the call.

"If you're going to hang around, Romanoff, you might as well come over. I need a hand." The blond hung up and stepped back inside the unit.

Minutes later, Natasha was pacing delicately down the corridor, her hand gun out and ready. She was certain they were the only people on this level so all her attention was focussed on Bobbi's unit.

She glanced around the edge of the open door, head down lower than usual height, ready to leap in either direction if she saw a weapon.

She saw an office. The storage room was set up like a little windowless office, with a desk along one wall and shelves covering all the others, stacked with books. Floor lamps cast a warm glow from two coroners. On a table covering about half the remaining space, a simplistic laboratory was set up, all beakers and Bunsen burners.

Bobbi was sitting with her back to the door, tapping on a keyboard attached to an ancient looking computer. 

"Hey. Come on in. I'm just about done here," Bobbi said calmly without looking around.  
Nat slowly entered the space, searching for and not finding a trap, distraction or ambush.  
When she looked back, Mockingbird had turned around and was smiling sarcastically at her.

"You gotta tell me, what'd you think was going on in here? I was holding a secret Hydra meeting? Writing out my 'take over the world' plans? Meeting with my young lover to cuckold Clint?"

"Weapons cache, actually."

"Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Just not this unit. That one's in Brooklyn. Though I am down to my last set of batons and they're trashed. Harder to replaced than guns."

Natasha stared at her a moment, then slowly holstered her firearm. "So, what is this place? Other than a rejected set from 'Bill Nye, The Science Guy'."

Bobbi's smiled got broader and more genuine. "I loved that show. This is what remains of the last fifteen Special Ops missions I was on before you and Rogers pulled Hydra out of the closet. I was the leader of a data extraction team, trying to collate all the findings on a very special project, some of which were not in friendly hands."

"Wouldn't all of that have gone to The Hub?"

"Yup. And also here. I checked the info you released, whatever else happened, nearly everything we transmitted over the last year of the project was gone. Either diverted or wiped. And that didn't include the data dumps from the last two sites, which I had on me when my team..." She trailed off, her face going pinched and closed.

Natasha nodded. "I saw the scars on your back. Shotgun?"

Grimace. "Yeah, I had the bad luck to be standing in front of the breacher in the final laboratory when Cap's transmission came through. All five of them...we'd worked together for over a year. Saved each other's lives, and they were all Hydra.I suppose it was easier for them to fool me en masse."

"You got lucky."

"They had the bad luck to shoot someone with very very good body armor under their uniform. Paranoid wet work professional with trust issues for the win."

"They're?"

"Deceased. I thought my left arm was toast, I was more than a little pissed off."

The two women watched each other gravely, cataloguing loss, betrayal and pain on both sides.

"So since then you were?"

"Healing. Running. Deciding."

"Deciding what?"

"If I should sell this data or burn it to the ground, like I did the labs it came from."

"You want to tell me what--"

"Ha! No."

Shrug. "All right."

"Really? Not going to interrogate me?"

"Wouldn't get either of us anything. We have make a base for trust somewhere. It's enough you know I'm not going to let you just walk away, or endanger the Avengers, or hurt Clint."

To Natasha's surprise, a gentle look passed over Bobbi's face. "You're a good friend to him; he told me you were his best friend. I'm glad he has you."

Surprised, Natasha blurted out the first thing in her head. "Aren't you his best friend by default? Now, anyway?"

"Oh, not at all, sport," Bobbi said with a head shake. "I love and adore him, wanna jump him 24/7 but we're not friends yet. Love is like lightening; friends is a slow burning fuse."

"Huh." Natasha nodded slowly, liking both the words and the woman speaking them. Then she looked around again. "So are you done here?"

"Hmm, oh, yeah, I was just going to nuke this hard drive but I was wondering if you could give me your opinion about something?"

"What?"

Bobbi stood up and walked over a foot locker on the bottom of one of the shelving units. Opening it, she revealed several bundles of clothing. "Is any of this stuff still wearable?"  
On the desk, the computer screen winked out and a thin wisp of smoke spiraled up out of the tower. The hard drive gave a slow painful death rattle and expired with a sharp snap.  
Natasha grinned at the other woman then walked over to look. The bundles were mostly nondescript pants and work shirts in boring colors. Cheap fabric and ugly cuts. She sized up the blond for a moment and then blinked.

"Are you seriously wearing Clint's clothes? How did you get the pants over your hips?"

"I feel like I'm in a corset. At least he's got such a nice chest its not binding my breasts. Almost."

"You could wear this stuff but not if I'm going to be around you. It's embarrassing."

"Well, what the hell else am I going to do? I don't have two dimes to rub together."

"Oh, my dearest, I have a Stark Industries credit card on me right this very moment and there are a vast number of clothing and shoes stores between here and the Tower. Shall we shop?"

Bobbi's face lit up with joy and she swiftly sprinted around the space, shoving a few books, a digital camera and some files into a satchel. She glanced over her shoulder at Natasha then unzipped a garment bag that had been hanging in the shadows. Inside, pristine and menacing, was a copy of the tactical gear she had been wearing that first night at the Tower: dull black super-kevlar flanking a stripe of white.

"I'll come back and clean this all out before the end of the month. But this I think I have to take with me."

Natasha stepped closer and touched the centre stripe; up close the white appeared to shimmer just a little and blurred at the edges. "Is this camotech?"

"Yeah. Actually, it's the prototype. It's only good for a few minutes at a time; the energy costs for a whole suit were so huge they scaled it down abruptly. Technically, you were using my gear when you and Cap trashed...well, SHIELD."

"Well, I'm glad I'm not going shopping with a woman who wears white into combat without a good reason." 

"I'm just that good."

The second shop they were in, Bobbi disappeared into a change room for a while with a pile of clothes and Natasha searched her bag swiftly but thoroughly. Nothing unusual except for the heavy weight of her tactical suit, which actually folded up quite nicely in the bottom. The digital camera turned on, then gave a low battery warning and flipped off again. When Bobbi came out of the change room to model a very nice black jean and dark blue blouse combo she looked at her bag, then at Natasha and smiled a little. It had been exquisitely polite of her to allow Black Widow the time to search it.

After that they just shopped, hitting about five stores before ending at a lingerie place quite near the Tower. Bobbi surprised Nat by picking out underwear in pastels, not the black or crimson that the redhead had expected.

"Pink, blue or yellow?" Bobbi asked, showing off matched bra and panty sets. 

"Get them all. Tony can afford it."

The blond grinned. "I'll make sure Clint thanks him."

Natasha looked at her out of the corner of her eye. "How'd you know?"

"What?"

"That he likes his women in soft colors."

"Oh, well..." Bobbi blinked and blushed just a little. "I've been with guys who liked fighters but it was always more...they either wanted to get beaten up or beat me up in the end, you know?"

"Intimately."

"Clint's the first guy I've ever known who's always treated me like his equal, like a warrior...and like a woman. I mean, he doesn't hide how much he...uh...enjoys the female form. But the fact that I've kicked him around in a fight...he's not hurt. His manhood's not challenged. He likes it, but not in a fetish-y way. He just likes to be around tough people who can take care of themselves, back him up if he needs it." Natasha nodded, a tiny smiled hovering on her lips. Bobbi continued. "And if that person happens to be a hot woman, he's just happier about it. He's never once tried to make me as a fighter be something separate from me as a woman."

She blushed again. "It seems to me, though, that he also likes the idea that I'm a woman. That he'd like the contrast. So I'm glad you're saying I'm right."

"Does it bother you? That he and I have--"

"Yeah, cause he was a priest before I met him," Bobbi rolled her eyes. "You have any designs on him now? He moving on you?"

"Not in the least. Not for years."

"Then why would it matter? In fact, it's useful to me...did he ever do that thing with you where he--" Bobbi dropped her voice almost to a whisper "--sets up shop down there? Like he's stocking up on pussy for a long cold winter or something?"

Natasha trilled a laugh, mostly from surprise. "Oh, boshe moi, yes. I had to threaten to knife him once to make him give it up."

"It can't be insecurity, I mean, come on, he's practically made me pass out a few times already, and we've only had the one night. Well, and morning. And before he left the Tower today."

"I think he just...likes it. More than once, that was all he did. He told me once he was...hold on, what was the phrase?...ah--'I was having so much fun making love, I forgot to come'."

Bobbi drew back. "Really? I married a guy who said that? Holy shit, I must have made some deity happy somewhere."

They arrived back at the Tower a few hours later, laden with cloth shopping bags, coffee and a bag of the sugar donuts Tony liked from the cart down the street. The 'Avengers Only' entrance to the left of the public doors swung open silently as they approached.  
Just inside the small, tasteful-for-Tony-Stark atrium, Clint Barton lurked in a pathetic attempt to look casual. He was still wearing his tactical gear, bow slung over his shoulders and cheeks wind blown from his motorcycle ride. He and Cap must have just gotten back.

"Hi there you two!" he chirped. "What'cha been doing?"

"Shopping, sport!" Bobbi bounced up to him, holding the bag full of lingerie foremost and thrusting it messily into his hands. One silky panty spilled out until he gathered it back reflexively...then stopped and clutched it in his fingers a moment. His face went an interesting shade of 'my groin hurts'. 

Bobbi stepped back and nudged Natasha gently in the side. "Oooh, that's a familiar look, hey?"

Black Widow snickered.

Clint looked at them both as though they were covered in venomous snakes and he didn't know how to point it out. Or was sure he wanted to.

The women smiled simultaneously, an identical expression that would have sent a lesser man running. 

"That was all you were doing? Shopping?" he said slowly.

Natasha shook her head. "Your poor wife, Clint, had no clothes. She was wearing your jeans. It was embarrassing."

He finally looked intently at Mockingbird, seeing the loosely-cut slacks of soft material, the gorgeously molded to her curves t-shirt, the shiny new runners.

"You look great, birdie. And that was so not an answer."

Bobbi kissed him on the cheek. "That's all we have to say. JARVIS, there are a couple more things being delivered today or tomorrow, they needed to be altered. Can you warn the front desk staff?"

"Anything arriving will be delivered to the Nest with alacrity, Mrs Barton."

"Thanks very much. Clint, which closet did you want me to start using, anyway?" 

"Uh," Clint blinked at her, then walked over and hit the elevator button. "Come'on, I'll come clear space with you. I use the main walk-in for my costume and weapons; I guess you need to get your stuff in there too."

The three of the them spent a happy domestic if still somewhat suspicious (on Clint's part) hour in the Nest, moving and sorting clothes.

Clint seemed to regard the friendly atmosphere in the room with deep anxiety. The women did their best to torment him, whispering together and exchanging significant looks whenever possible. Bobbi was just rearranging her underwear drawer when he finally snapped.

"You," he pointed at Natasha, "out. Go fuck with Steve's head or something. I need to have words with my wife."

"He's bad blocking low to the left," Natasha said to Bobbi with a smile.

"And he hitches his hooks when he's right lead, it's like stop motion," Bobbi returned.

"Go away, you Russian shit disturber," Clint made shooing motions with his hands, then followed her out of the room, having a low, intense conversation that Bobbi didn't even bother to try and hear. If she needed to know about it, Nat would tell her later. So she had her back to the door when Clint came back in the room in a smooth rush, scooped her up and threw her onto the bed.

Reflexively, Bobbi got her legs up and kicked him in the chest when he followed; he flew across the room and hit the wall hard enough to drop him to his knees.

She came up onto her bare feet, standing on the bed, fists raised. He looked up at her, his square, manly face alive with hunting pleasure. 

"You wanna do this, little bird?" He caressed the words, making the heat rise in her belly. "I win, you tell me what you and Natasha were really doing out there."

"I already kicked your ass once."

"And I kicked yours."

"Best two outta three then?"

"Bring it."

He circled left around the bed, away from the door. She watched him, not taking the bait. Between one step and the next, she bent at the waist and flipped off the bed (the Nest had high ceilings), her right heel slashing down at this collar bone. Clint stepped back, and caught the descending limb. It jolted him, and he grunted. She pulled out of his grip and landed on the carpet, staring at him intently.

They were both surprised: him by the sheer power behind her strike and her that anyone on the planet had been fast and strong enough to catch it.

"It's a bit funny that we were obviously holding back before," Bobbi said calmly, putting a precise distance between them and stopping. She stood poised and graceful, hovering on the edge of motion.

"I don't react well to people trying to control my thoughts. I was mad, not thinking about technique. You hit like Steve, lady."

"Flattery will get you--"

She dropped into a double-leg take down, which was exactly not what he'd been expecting. He hit the carpet with Bobbi on his stomach, the breath wuffing out of him. Her hand came back in the fist. 

Clint reached up and grabbed her under the armpits and lifted her into the air, then threw her to the side. Still breathless, he followed her in a wallowing rush, wrapping his long legs around hers from behind and getting one arm around her throat. Her elbow came back hard, directly into his midriff and black spots showed on the edge of his vision as the last of his oxygen disappeared. His arm spasmed off her throat; she spun in his grip, slamming her hands down on either side of his head. 

He looked up at her, clear-eyed and smiling a little. A line of blood trickled from his bottom lip.

Breathing hard, Bobbi leaned down and licked the salty sweet liquid off his skin.

"So...draw?" Clint gasped.

She sat up and pulled off her shiny new shirt in one swift motion. 

Clint's face lit up like a solar flare. "Buttercup yellow? Oh, be still my beating erection." He bucked his hips into hers, in case she missed the physical evidence.

Bobbi gave him a side-eyed look. "Are you on viagra intravenously? Most guys can't get it up this much in a month." 

"It's having beautiful half-naked woman sitting on my groin. Nothin' I can do about it."

"I'm a bio-chemist. I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of stuff we can do about it. Chemical castration for instance."

Forever after, neither of them could remember how they got back onto the bed. Clint did...something complicated and fast and slightly pissed off and he was on top of her, the full weight of his body pinning her to the soft warm surface, her arms over her head and wrists held tightly in one of his big hands.

"Not even joking about something like that, little bird."

Bobbi's eyes were shining. "Or this. This would also help the issue."

"Shut up, getting all these clothes off one handed requires concentration."

"You could let me go."

"You'll punch me."

"True."

Then she gasped and sighed. He'd started with both their pants. Clint sat up, pulling her with him so she was sitting on his thighs, his cock buried in her to the hilt. He still had her hands pinned together, now at the nape of her neck. He kissed the hollow of her throat.

"Truce?"

Her response was a low moan that he took for yes. When he released her hands, she wrapped them around his shoulders, sliding one into his short sandy hair and forcing his head back so that she could bite the place where his throat and shoulder joined. 

"Stop it. Can't work bra straps while you're full vampire on me."

"Suck it up, sport."

She had to order a replacement for the bra. 'Shredded' was generally un-fixable in lingerie.


	3. Thor Puts The Hammer Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor IS a prince, you know....

Two days after he first met the bride of his comrade, Thor stood in the doorway of the spacious modern-by-Midgard-standards gymnasium Stark had provided for the Avengers tower and watched the Lady Barton at her exertions.

She was skilled; to his eye she could give any of his warriors a great battle. He felt the urge to match against her himself. He liked handicapping himself: with her going full out he would still have to hold back to avoid injuring her. 

He had thought her wholly engrossed in her training and was surprised when she popped to her feet from a set of push ups to smile at him. 

"I'll be done in a moment, your Majesty. Sorry if I took your gym time."

Thor laughed in surprise. "I am no Prince on Midgard, Lady Barton. Call me Thor, as all my boon companions do. And, nay, you disturb me not; there is room for both of us. I am glad at heart to share my home with such a warrior."

Her smiled broadened. "Man, that should sound hokey but coming from you...thanks. I've haven't had access to anything like this for years, I'm going a little overboard, I know."

Her clothes were as soaked as if she'd bathed in them, her hair dark with sweat.

Thor walked over to one of the benches and shed his outer clothes, leaving himself in only a pair of short breeches of that strange but comfortable cloth called "lycra" on Midgard. 

When he turned around, he caught Mockingbird with her eyes crossed a little, goggling at his bare torso. "They grow'em big in Asgard, don't they?" she muttered almost unconsciously.

"My lady?"

"Oh! Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to...well, I MEANT stare. I didn't mean to get CAUGHT staring."

He laughed again, deep in his gut. "There is no shame in looking upon another's form. I find yours most pleasing myself, but I know my own Lady Jane would be wroth with me to hear it."

She grimaced. "Clint'd take a swing at you if he heard me talking like this and I can't see that ending well for anyone."

"His love for you is as flame, burning bright like the new-born star it is. I would forgive him any jealousy, though I can see most clearly he need not be concerned."

"Really? Why?"

"He may look at you as though you were the sun and the moon but you gaze upon him as though he were the very breath in your chest."

"He is," Bobbi agreed solemnly. "My breath, the beat of my heart, the blood in my veins."

"Good. He is a good man, a mighty warrior. He deserves a woman who values him."

She blinked up at the tall blond man. "He's very lucky then, because he has friends who value him too."

He smiled and started his workout, lifting impossibly heavy weights like they were feathers and just generally being super-human. He caught her looking at him more than once, as though she couldn't help herself. If he caught her eye, he grinned, she looked embarrassed, rinse repeat. She had moved from some sort of complicated strength training circuit to pure cardio, running on the treadmill with headphones on and VERY DETERMINEDLY NOT LOOKING AT THOR. So she didn't notice when Steve, Clint and Tony came into the gym. Since the treadmills Stark had were almost silent, the music was fairly loud and Bobbi was tucked into one corner, there was a good chance they didn't see her either.

The three men were arguing in a strained, polite way. Well, Steve was strained and polite; Tony was flippant and Clint looked like his head was going to explode.

"Eh, JARVIS can track her like he tracks the rest of us, Steve. If she tries to set a bomb or tape you in the shower or something I'll know about it," Tony was wearing sloppy sweatpants and a ratty Iron Maiden t-shirt, slouching over to the bench press and starting to set his weights.

"And if you're not here?" Steve snapped.

"You're next in line for info, I swear," Tony rolled his eyes. 

"For fuck's sake Steve what'd you want? Her to wear an ankle tracer and a collar with a bell on it?" Clint's voice was low and snarling.

"I want to know the secure areas of this building are actually SECURE. Given that our lives and sometimes the lives of everyone ON THE PLANET depend on our equipment and information not being tampered with--"

"SHE'S NOT GOING TO TAMPER WITH ANYTHING!" Clint was one of the few people any of them knew who could yell at someone that loudly, with that much anger, and not change their facial expression. He, Steve and Natasha shared the trait of getting colder and more precise the angrier they got; since the other three were "hot" when they got angry, it made for a good contrast. 

"HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?" Steve got right into Clint's face, yelling back. Clint brought a hand up and Steve backed off, shaking his head. "How do you know that?" he repeated, quietly. "You don't. You don't know anything about her, Clint, other than what? She's good in bed?"

Clint punched him in the face, with his right hand, his fist moving so fast not even Steve had time to get out of the way. Captain America's head jerked back and his eyes went cup-of-ice-in-a-freezer-in-the-middle-of-an-arctic-blizzard cold. Clint was literally hopping mad and getting ready to hit him again. Tony was staring at them both open mouthed.

Thor walked up, grabbed Clint's arm and lifted him off the ground. The archer yelped in surprise and pain, dangling about a foot off the ground. "In Asgard, Hawkeye, to strike the commander of one's forces is punishable by death or a at least a whipping. A true warrior controls his emotions, even over such a subject."

"Well, buddy, we're not in ASGARD and he's an ASSHOLE, not my commander. Put me DOWN."

Steve stepped back, straightened up and tried very very hard not to look smug. He almost but not quite succeeded. Tony was surreptitiously recording the whole thing on his phone.

"He is the leader in combat here." Thor raised his hand, shaking the archer in his grip a little, as a wolf might shake a pup. "Even I am glad to defer to his skill in battle here in Midgard, where different rules apply than the wars I have made in the other realms. Perhaps you do not share my regard for his courage and skill but you should at least show respect for him as a soldier and your elder." Thor leaned in, his deep voice grave and quiet in the face of Clint's tantrum. Clint snarled at him then winced in pain. "You are not acting with the honor or decorum I have seen you display in the past. I am ashamed of you this hour, master archer."

"He...damn it, he keeps insulting my wife, Thor!"

"I heard no insult. I heard a man much concerned with the safety of others--with your safety and hers, in all truth--doing no more than his duty. Perhaps he spoke flippantly of her carnal prowess--"

"Carnal prowess! This is the best thing ever!" Tony choked out.

"Thank you, Man of Iron, I am glad I amuse you so much," Thor looked over at him and Tony subsided with a twitch. "In any case, he spoke respectfully until you yourself made mock of him and his honest worries. Hear me, I like your woman. I find her comely, well-spoken, quick-witted and seemingly much smitten with you. For your sake, I hope it is all true. But the Captain is right. You do not know her well and we live dangerous lives. I have been betrayed by those I loved, my friend. Loving someone is not enough reason to trust them."

"Clint," Bobbi said softly from behind Thor, his bulk hiding her from view. She stepped around the Asgardian and threw a sad look at the four men. She'd clearly been listening for a while. Steve flinched in surprise at the sight of her. "He's right. Both he's, Cap and Thor. They shouldn't trust me, and probably you shouldn't either."

"I do trust you, Bobbi. That's not going to change," Clint said fiercely, still dangling from Thor's grip. "They better learn to live with it."

Bobbi nodded, then turned and rabbit punched Thor in the ribs. "Put my husband down, big guy, or we find out how much damage one human woman can do to a God of Thunder."

Thor smiled at her approvingly. "You are loyal, I give you that, and you share his fool-hardy, headstrong nature. Be careful, lady, that it does not lead you both to tragedy." He dropped Hawkeye next to her unceremoniously.

"At the moment, my life is a slapstick comedy. This whole thing is moronic and yes, I mean you, Clint." She glared at him as her rubbed his shoulder petulantly. "You PUNCHED CAPTAIN AMERICA over me, you raging CAVEMAN ALPHA MALE IDIOT. You PUNCHED CAPTAIN AMERICA for DOING HIS DAMN JOB. I DON'T NEED PROTECTION FROM CAPTAIN AMERICA."

Clint blinked at her and nodded, looking sheepish suddenly. "Ooooohhhh, yeah, I wasn't thinking about that part. I was really mad."

"I know. And thank you; I love you too. But don't punch my heroes in the face okay?"

"He's your hero?" Tony blurted pointing at Steve.

"Captain America, the first Avenger? Of course he is," Bobbi said. Still looking sad she turned and walked out of the room, her shoulders slumped. "Or, you know, he was until I found out he hates me." They almost didn't hear her last words, slow and small and heartbroken. 

"Mockingbird, I don't hate you. I don't KNOW you. That's the point of all this. And also, cut the crap. Oscar-winning performances like that aren't going to make me trust you sooner." Steve rolled his eyes again and shook his head.

She straightened up abruptly in the door way and snapped her fingers, still facing away from them. "Damn. That was a good one too, I thought I'd be able to milk it for at least the rest of the day. Point to you, Cap." She looked over her shoulder, a grin flickering on her face. "See you upstairs, Hawky-poo. You've got some groveling to do." 

All four of them were straight and male enough to pause the discussion to watch her walk away.

Tony glanced at Clint. "She's pretty much you with boobs you know."

"They're really nice boobs, too," Clint agreed. "And she's waaaaaayyyyy smarter than me." He looked down and all but ground his toe into the floor. "She wouldn't be dumb enough to punch the team leader in the face over nothing and then get scolded by the God of Thunder."

He sighed and walked over to the squat rack, which is where he'd been headed when Steve confronted him earlier. "I'm sorry, guys," Clint said slowly and clearly, unashamed but sincere. "Steve, I'm sorry I went ballistic on you but I'm not...I get crazy in a heartbeat when you start talking about her the way you do. I guess because it's important to me that you accept her. But I was wrong wrong wrong to hit you. And I do respect you." 

"You've gotta deal with it better, Clint. And its a lousy way to get me to like her...so you're hurting her too, aren't you? But I accept your apology. I never thought you didn't respect me. You're just a total jerk sometimes," Steve ended mildly. 

Tony laughed. "If it matters, I like her. Hawky-poo." His smile was swinging between delighted and vicious.

"So, you're looking for an arrow-based stress test on the Bugatti paint job? That's what I'm hearing right now," Clint remarked brightly.

"I'll forget I heard her say that."

"Might be best." Clint turned to Thor. "I'm sorry that I made you think less of me, even for a minute. I'm a dumb mutt surrounded by pure bloods; I get my hackles up when I think I'm being ignored." He looked all three of them in the eye, one by one. "I'm sorry."

Tony now looked half-way between awed and uncomfortable. No one had ever heard Clint apologize for anything. Ever. 

Steve nodded gravely, his stiff posture relaxing a little. "Thank you. And I'm not ignoring you; trust me, I don't think anyone can ignore the way you talk about her."

"You are as ardent in speech of her as any poet in the halls of Valhalla," Thor rumbled, returning to his work out. 

Clint's brow furrowed. "I could maybe manage a limerick 'There once was a bird named Bobbi...'"

"I really don't want to hear this," Steve said in a pinched voice.

"Tight ass," Clint said mildly, without his earlier rancor. Steve grinned a little--that was normal banter between them. He turned to leave.

"Steve." Clint's voice was more serious than usual and the super soldier turned back questioningly. "She told me to have JARVIS lock her out of anything but the shared floors and the Nest the night she showed up. She can't get anywhere, including the armory or the labs or the servers without one of us or all hell breaking loose."

Steve spun on his heel. "Why didn't you say that sooner?"

"I thought you'd checked. That's why I couldn't figure out why you were harping on it so hard." Clint had excellent facial control but he couldn't quite suppress the 'ha ha' twitch of one corner of his mouth. 

"You are such an asshole," Steve said, shaking his head and walking away. Behind him, he heard Tony crowing: "You got him to swear! Ten points!"


	4. History Lessons with Captain America

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve wants to know more about Mockingbird and finds out she knows a hell of a lot about him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Couple of sexy-times in this chapter -- and I wanted it to be clear, these are not just gratuitous.
> 
> There is character stuff directly linking back to the way Clint and Bobbi interact with each other, coming up in later chapters.

Steve Rogers, Captain America, took a deep breath and touched the call button on the door outside of the Nest, as Clint Barton's apartment in the Tower was known. 

A bright but slightly stressed female voice rang out of the intercom. "Yes? Who is it?"

"Steve. I was wondering if we could talk...uh...Mockingbird."

He couldn't bring himself to call her Mrs. Barton--it sounded bizarre to him--and he didn't think he had the right to call her Bobbi just yet.

"Sure, sure, just come in. I'm sorta in the middle of something in the kitchen here."

The door obligingly slid open.

"Thanks, JARVIS," he heard her shout from around the right corner of the doorway. 

Huh. She was polite to the AI that ran their lives and watched over them like a slightly sarcastic mother hen. That was a good sign.

Steve braced himself and stepped inside. He felt a stab of guilt that he was even doing this. He'd waited till he knew Hawkeye would be unavailable for hours--on patrol with Natasha. In fact he and Bobbi Barton--nee Morse--were the only people on the Avengers-only levels.

Then he noticed the smell in the air: garlic, frying meat, ginger, cooking vegetables. He couldn't have backed away again if he'd wanted to, it was that great. He was hungry, as usual. He was always hungry these days.

All of the Avenger's apartments were of a similar layout, big open plan living/dining room on the right with the semi-enclosed kitchen at the far end; bedrooms and bathrooms on the left. 

The blond stranger that Clint had dragged into their lives was standing at the stove, surrounded by a delicious miasma of steam and dropping small cylinders of something into a pan of hot oil. She looked up with a happy grin as he settled in against the counter, arms crossed.

"Sorry, sorry. The lumpia are at the critical stage and I can't step away."

"Lumpia?" 

"Pilipino spring rolls. Promised the ball-and-chain I'd make them tonight and he's due back in a bit. Just texted me."

Steve glanced down at the -- well they all told him it was a phone -- lying on the counter. The square glass face was still lit up with a candid shot of a grinning Hawkeye that to Steve's gaze appeared to have been clearly taken in bed from underneath and he was really not going to finish that thought nope nope nope...

"So," the woman continued, "you'll excuse me not looking at you like a polite person but I can sure talk, if that's all right, hey sport?" She did look up at him again then, a bright smile plastered on her face.

Steve was smart and sensitive enough to see the apprehension in her eyes. Despite her brash exterior, she was scared of him.

"Certainly. This isn't what I came to talk about," Steve said despite his intentions to be all business, "but where did you learn to make Pilipino food?"

"Oh, I grew up in Manila," she offered casually. "Born in Long Beach, but my parents were oil company execs. Moved us over there when I was six or something. I spent my youth in a boarding school. Why do you think I took up stick fighting? Escrima is the national art over there."

"Actually, I didn't know that was your skill set. I really don't know a damn thing about you."

She brushed right past his leading statement.

"Double sticks and staff are my specialty and without arrogance there aren't too many people on the planet I'm afraid of with my batons in hand. But I've got empty-hand skills too and I'm a good shot. There were only two SHIELD agents who out scored me with long arms and one of them was Hawkeye. To be fair, they had to change to scientific notation to accurately record his numbers so I think he doesn't count at that point."

"Who was the other?"

"Natasha. Hill, by the way, destroys all three of us with hand guns."

Steve clenched his teeth on another question. He was not here to get into a cozy chat with this interloper. He was here to grill her. 

Damn but the food smelled great though. 

He caught her looking at him with speculation, then grabbing a plate out of the cupboard and piling it with little golden brown cylinders of flaky pastry. A small dish of something black with a smear of red in the center joined it.

"That's just soya sauce and garlic chili paste, dip them or ignore it as you will." She turned back to the pan and continued to dunk and remove the remaining rolls.

Steve picked up one of them in his fingers, still hot and crispy, and bit into it. The stuffing spilled across his tongue, rich and salty and so good he was crunching his way through the last in the pile, well smeared in the sauce, before he knew it.

The golden-haired woman was straightening from the oven where she had stashed more of the food, set to warm, her face weirdly intent.

"How much do you eat, Captain Rogers?"

"What?" he stared at her, taken aback.

"How many calories are you taking in? Every day?"

"I don't...I don't know...why do you ask?"

How was she doing this? He'd meant to be severe and serious, to interrogate her. 

Bobbi reached over and circled his forearm with one of her hands. Her middle finger and thumb met when they curled up. "I have small hands, Captain. You're what? Six three? I should not be able to do this. I guarantee you're probably eating half the calories you need, and you have been for a long time. Since the day you were 'born', I'd guess."

Her skin was warm and he could feel odd, thick spots of callus like mountains in the soft expanse. Stick-fighter, right. She was looking into his face and suddenly her other hand reached out to trace the line of his jaw. "Your cheekbones are sharp enough to cut glass. You have to eat more."

He jerked away from her and caught a flash of hurt on her face, quickly covered by a sardonic grin. 

"Erskine died before he could give you all the info about what happened to you, Howard Stark never really knew what the process was going to do to you and everyone else just saw the outcome, not the man underneath." She backed away from him, poured two glasses of orange juice and slid one over to him, careful not to touch him again. "Your metabolism is super-charged now. That muscle may have been created by the process but you're the one maintaining it. You should be eating at least nine thousand calories a day and I would be happier to see more than ten." 

"How would you know that?"

Her eyes were very sad above the grin. "I was one of the brightest lights in biochemistry before SHIELD recruited me. I handed off a shot at a Nobel Prize to work for the greater good, for fieldwork...until my team mates shot me in the back. One project everyone looked at was the Super Soldier formula; I wrote papers and papers about it for the analysts, the field agents, Fury. There was so much I could see no one was thinking about when they made you. And looking at you now...I was right. Please eat more. Everyone needs you healthy." She shook her head, her smile fading. "S-s-s-saw you on TV during the Invasion and I could tell then; tried to figure out how to get you a message you'd listen to. B-b-b-but I was...I was in a b-b-bad p-p-place. Bad people were h-h-h-hurting me; they had the TV on loud twenty four hours a day and I couldn't sleep and I tried to find something to focus..." 

Her head went down like a whipped dog and her hands clenched till her knuckles went white. 

Battle fatigue, they'd called it in his war. It could kill, as surely as a gun or a knife; he'd seen it drive good men, strong men, insane.

Steve's kneejerk reaction got the better of him. He walked over and hugged her. She resisted for a moment then rested her head on his chest. When she pulled away, HE felt weirdly hurt. 

"Sorry. It's been a hard...year. Or three. Some of this Clint doesn't even know yet."

He tried to think of something to distract her as he returned to his seat.

"How far did you get? On making more of me?"

She shrugged, opened the fridge and extracted the elements of a salad. "The process was insanely complicated. And I'm not that smart, really." She gave him a small sad look.

"If I might interject, Mrs. Barton," JARVIS said calmly. "but that is inaccurate. Your IQ tests on record are all above the 230 range. You are by any standard a genius."

"JARVIS, I was being humble."

"Ah, the nuance escaped me; I had thought you were prevaricating. My apologies."

"Don't be a smart ass, JARVIS."

Steve was glaring, to which she shrugged. 

"I'm not going to say just yet would also work as an answer, sport." She was chopping tomatoes, her hands a smooth blur. She'd clearly left "knife-fighter" off that resume, from her grip on the blade.

"How do you expect me--us--to trust you when you keep doing things like that?" He blurted out. It had been the only thing on his mind since the moment he saw her. The fact that everyone else seemed to accept her was only making it worse.

 _Can't you see what you're risking? She could destroy us all by accident! Let alone because she's actually an enemy._ He wanted to scream at them all. And deep in his heart rang the words: _She could break up my new family. I only just found them!_

She laughed at him. "Gods, Captain. I don't."

"What?"

"Clint wants you to trust me blind because he thinks he did--he didn't, of course. In the first forty-eight hours I knew the guy we'd done everything two people can do together except buy and house and have a baby. It was like compressing five years of dating and running Special Ops missions together into one weekend. He stood with me in the middle of a crucible and neither of us got burned to death; he sees that truth whenever he looks at me. Trust is earned; I earned his walking through the outer levels of hell barefoot with him. I don't WANT to do that with you. I'd rather take the slower route and pay my tolls. I expect I'll be paying for a long time. I just hope you keep your mind open is all."

He hadn't been expecting that. He hadn't been expecting her to be...realistic about the whole thing. 

"You understand why I'm having problems with you being here?" He studied her face, looking for anger or deception. He found a little of the first but not the second and had to remind himself that like Natasha this woman was a professional liar. 

_You trust Natasha. How is this woman different?_ His traitor brain muttered at him.

"Because you protect people. It's what you do, it's what you are. You're trying, in your own 'I'm from the '40's and men don't talk about their feelings' way to protect Clint from getting his heart broken. You see the abused kid in him, still hurting from one abandonment after the other, jumping at what he thinks is love. You're smart and you know that things like this, these whirl-wind romances, they almost never end well."

"You are pretty perceptive," he said, confirming her words with a nod.

"I'm good at what I do. Being a spy is about understanding why people do things...also, I have a Bachelor's in Psychology, I got bored one summer during my thesis defense and...this is edging into bragging, sorry..."

"I've known Tony Stark for almost three years. This is positively humble."

"Captain, I love Clint. I know these all seems insane and moronic and destined to fail and I don't know...maybe. But not because I'm falsifying my love for him. I refuse to think about it failing; I refuse to assume it will. I would die for him. And he would die for all of you; altruism is transitive, you know. For me anyway. He would die for you, so I would do the same."

He took the time to finish his orange juice and pour another glass, using the motion to cover what he was thinking. 

"You can't be sure of that."

"I don't think anyone's ever SURE of that kind of thing but...I got into a dangerous line of work with my eyes open. I've never expected to die in bed, surrounded by fat grandchildren. I expect to die young-ish--I am in my late thirties now--and hard: in pain and fear, surrounded by angry people who hate me. But there are innocents walking around today, alive and well, because of things I did, because of me directly. I'm proud of that. I'd like to keep doing that as long as I can."

His damn brain whispered: _That's a pretty good definition of hero, buddy._

She looked like she was reading the thought on his face. "It's why I didn't hesitate with Clint, Captain Rogers. I have no idea how much time I've got with him. I want it to count."

"Have you thought about having children? In my day, that was what you did, get married, have babies. Things seem different now."

She nodded. "Clint asked me that too. I had myself fixed in my twenties. I'm no one's mother and it's too important a job to do with half a heart. Maybe we'll change our minds after a few years of marriage but until then...Clint and I agree."

The main door opened and shut with a slam.

"Honey, I'm home!" Hawkeye's voice rang out loudly from the doorway.

"I'm in the kitchen with another man, sport," his wife shouted back at him, snickering in Steve's general direction. Her whole demeanor changed, from intense and sincere to something approaching giddy. 

Steve catalogued that for later.

"Oh, you harlot you," Hawkeye yelled back, mockingly. There was a series of noises that sounded like random clattering and which they both interpreted correctly as Clint carefully and lovingly racking his 'everyday' bow and quiver on the weapons wall. Steve had noted new spaces for handguns and what he now knew would be batons. 

The archer bounced into the kitchen like a large friendly puppy and instantly descended on his wife, wrapping her up from behind in his long, heavily muscled arms and nuzzling her cheek. "It smells awesome in here, birdie. You're a dream come true."

"Hey, I'm not making these every night or nothing! I've got a life to live!" She turned her head into his so they could kiss, lightly and sweetly.

"Aw, darn, I married you so you'd cook for me, that's it. Annulment time!"

"Look, I warned you I had no womanly skills, sport."

"Oh." Hawkeye's hands swooped down her sides to jerk her hips into his. "Oh, you've got lots of womanly skills, no worries."

She hissed sharply and closed her eyes, arching her back into his chest.

"Ahem," Steve coughed. Hawkeye grinned at him over his wife's golden head, insufferable as always.

"Oh, sorry Cap, didn't see you there."

"Sure. Sure you didn't."

Clint frowned at the used plate. "Aw, man, you're co-opting my dinner now too?"

Bobbi elbowed him in the diaphragm. "Shut up, jackass. He can eat anything he wants. Ignore the heathen, Cap."

Steve shook his head. "No, I should go anyway. It's been interesting talking with you, Mockingbird."

"Her name's Bobbi," Clint remarked mildly--but his eyes were glittering like diamonds.

His wife elbowed him again. "Still to be shutting up, you TOTAL jackass. He can use whatever name he wants."

"I'll let myself out before you cripple him. Night."

"Night, Cap," Clint said, then waited till the door closed. He stuck his head into the hall and checked the other man was actually gone, then looked at his wife. "The hell was he doing here?"

"Believe it or not, just talking. He was reasonable and engaged; even tried to comfort me once. Sit, eat, they're better warm."

They took seats at the small table in the open plan dining room-living room area and started in on the food. Clint made rapturous noises as he demolished the remaining spring rolls and salad. Bobbi had her own share more sedately, obviously thinking hard about something.

"What'd you mean by that? That he tried to comfort you?" he asked after a long stretch of comfortable silence.

"What? Oh, I was talking about that week I spent as A.I.M.'s guest and I started to stutter again. I think you're right, I think once I felt safe my brain flicked off the 'survival mode' switch and turned the crank up on the 'PTSD' rheostat. Anyway, he hugged me, almost against his own will. It was a nice gesture...sorta."

"There is a massive 'but' in that sentence."

"Are you saying I have a big ass?"

"Hmmm, not sure, it's been too long since I've seen it, I'll have to check." They both laughed for a while.

"But--she said using the interjection and not the slang term for buttocks--yeah, I think it might hurt us both more than it helped at the time."

"How?"

"Because he came here to interrogate me with no gatekeeper--you--around. And instead we talked about food and trauma and potential babies and what it means to be in love. He's going to wind up pissed off at himself and then he's going to take it out on me, because now he feels comfortable enough around me to do that."

"Which means?"

"I'll probably have to fight him some time soon."

"He'll wreck you," Clint said in a matter-of-fact voice, his brow furrowed with concern.

"Maybe...probably...but possibly not. I have some tricks not even you've seen, because they would have permanently damaged you. I'm just working the angles in my head. I think it might be best if I provoked him into it."

"You, the alleged genius in this room, want to provoke CAPTAIN AMERICA into a fight? He wouldn't do it, he's not going to fight a woman like that." He paused. "Potential babies? Was he propositioning you?" 

"No, you idiot, any potential babies of ours. I told him what we'd agreed. For the rest? Yeah, he will. He's got 'I'm the biggest dog in this room' syndrome times a million. He wouldn't be able to resist proving the point if I push him hard enough. Though if it comes down to it, I might need you to step in and help guide the situation in the right direction."

Clint stared at her, taken aback. "Steve? Steve's just a good guy--he doesn't think like that."

"Really? How much time do he and Stark spend posturing at each other, vying for dominance? Steve Rogers IS a good man, a great man even--but I don't think he's always a NICE man."

"Point taken. Guide?" 

"Make the stakes higher than just me trying to make him mad." She tapped the table once. 

Clint looked at her with narrowed eyes and then brightened. "Oh, right, yeah, I get it. Sure, I can do that. No one expects me to be subtle about things."

"You've been cultivating 'D'oh, I'm just a simple minded marksman, look squirrel!' for long enough, I think. I watched you do it in briefings at SHIELD."

"I never saw you. I can't believe I never saw you." He looked stricken.

"You and Nat were on a different plane than the rest of us, even the rest of Spec Ops. Looking back now, I think maybe Fury was actively keeping us all apart. I kept my head down, at his orders. He never liked me to talk about what I was doing."

"What were you doing?"

She looked away, her face very blank and still. "I'm not...I'm not ready to talk about it yet. I'm sorry. I shed so much blood over all of it, lost so much. Threw away my life for Fury's fucking mission. And now I have this new life that I never dreamed I would get, like a fantasy or something. I'm not sure I want to contaminate this with that old poison." She looked back at him and her eyes were terrified.

Clint shrugged. "Okay." He returned to eating, casually. 

She stared at him in silence. He shrugged again, smiling crookedly.

When she stood up to clear her plate, her hands were shaking. From the kitchen, she went into the main bathroom. He stayed where he was, giving her space he sensed she needed. 

She ambushed him dead to rights. He was rinsing dishes in the sink, happy that they shared the opinion that using something once didn't mean you had to scrub it when Bobbi walked up behind him, spun him around by the hips and dropped to her knees.

Before he could think or speak she had his fly open, pants down and his cock in her mouth. Then all he could do was moan and brace himself, hands buried in her hair and eyes half-closed with pleasure.

When she was finished with him and he was basically a limp puddle of flesh lolling against the counter she kissed him on the cheek, retrieved something from the fridge and sauntered into the living room.

He heard the TV turn on, the unmistakable crack of a baseball bat and her exclaim "Oh, goody! Yankees game!"

Clint made his way slowly into the room to see her lounging across the big plush sofa, a bottle in her hand and what sure looked like a Yankees game on the TV.

"Damn it. I thought these were twist off...can you grab the opener, sport?" She threw him a bright look, rich with self-aware sexuality. Whatever intense emotions had gripped her earlier, she was calm and controlled again. She was holding one of those expensive microbrew beers Stark stocked the fridges with.

"No need," he mumbled, still half out of his mind with the feel of her soft mouth feathering across the shaft of his...

Clint gulped, grabbed the bottle of beer and jerked the cap off as though it were made of tinfoil.

Bobbi's eyes went wide. "Holy crap. That explains some of the stuff you can do with your hands."

"You like that stuff?"

"I love that stuff." Her smile ramped up to vixen. "Here do it again, I brought one out for you."

Clint sat down next to her and crowded her into the corner of the sofa until she was sitting in his lap, then took the other beer and repeated the action.

Bobbi settled into her seat happily as a child on a swing and took an experimental swig of beer. "Whoa, nelly. That's...really good."

"Only the best around here...let me get this straight: did you actually just give me the best blowjob I've ever had in my life, bring two beer into the living room and turn on a baseball game by choice?"

"Yeah."

He put down his bottle and started running his hands over her scalp and neck. "Okay, where do you plug in? No way you're human; Tony made in the lab, right? No one's that perfect."

"Oh, the socket's a bit lower than that, sport." She nipped at his inner arm with a grin and sucked in her breath when he slid one strong hand into the waist of her jeans.

They actually made it all the way to the seventh inning but by the time people were singing "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" the Bartons were buck naked, lying side by side with her back pressed into his chest and his right hand rubbing sharply in time with his pumping hips.

She kept trying to turn into him, sloppily kissing him half-sideways and moaning with the motion of his fingers. He bit the point where her throat met her shoulder, as she had done for him the other day, and shuddered with the high-pitched squeal that invoked.

Then the noise dropped into a throaty feral growl and she contracted around him. Unlike most women he'd been with, her voice got lower when she came. He'd teased her that first night that she turned into Darth Vader when she orgasmed.

She'd shrieked "I am the Queen of the Sith!" and mimed a force choke at him from the far side of the bed.

That's when he found out that sex with a giggling, goofy partner could be incredibly intense, even when you were laughing so hard you were getting cramps.

Clint smiled into her hair on the couch, remembering. 

"Bobbi?"

"Nnnnth-yeth?" she muttered sleepily.

"You don't ever have to tell me anything. Or anyone else. Not even Steve. And if that's not good enough for him...well, I have money socked away. We can always go free-lance."

She went very still in his arms. "If I do tell...it'll be because you said that."


	5. Tony Touches Other People's Stuff

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> People who can kill you with their bare hands are dangerous to upset.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter. Longer ones coming.

"Err, Mr Stark?"

Bobbi's quiet voice from the doorway of his lab/garage/lair made Tony Stark start but when he turned towards blond woman lurking there his smile was as smooth and suave as ever.

"If you're here to seduce me, I'm afraid I'm already taken."

"Not that watching you dodge a hail of arrows wouldn't be funny--no. But thanks! I actually wanted to ask if I could use your lathe, blowtorch and welding equipment."

"Hooo-boy, that Hawkeye must be one kinky bastard."

Bobbi advanced a few steps into the room, shaking her head. "Hey, it's not all sex all the time in Chez Barton, you know."

"Yeah. What'd you do yesterday?"

"Had sex, ate breakfast, had sex in the shower, sexted each other while he was out of the tower, made dinner, talked to Captain America, had sex in the kitchen after he left, watched a baseball game...had sex during said baseball game, point taken. But we're not out of control."

"How so?"

"We waited for Rogers to leave."

Tony was falling in love. This was like playing tennis. He volleyed her shot back at her.

"Woulda been more impressed if you hadn't."

Her hand flew to her mouth, as though trying to press back the laughter and failing. "I would have but I forgot to set up the webcam to catch his facial expression!"

"I bet we could make good money on an Avengers porn site," Tony choked out.

They both clutched at the table and laughed. Tony wiped his eyes with a sigh.

"You can use anything in here that isn't actually one of my suits...but why? What do you need it for?"

She held up two much battered and dented metal cylinders. "My personal weapons are a little worse for wear; last surviving set. And I want to beg the specs off the government like I want to jam forks in my eyes. I need to see if I can manufacture a new pair."

Tony stared at her, aghast. "You. You? You think you're going to manufacture new ones?" He stepped close and snatched at one of the metal batons...

...and came to on the other side of the room with an aching shoulder, surrounded by about fifteen thousand loose bolts. She'd thrown him into one of the holdalls. 

Bobbi was standing in arrested horror near the door, panting hard and clutching at her head.

"I'm s-s-sorry," she sobbed once then turned and fled. He heard her crying, then the sound of the elevator.

Tony blinked at the ceiling. "Jarvis, where's she heading?" 

"Mockingbird has just entered the Nest and appears to be weeping in Hawkeye's arms."

"Great. Warn me when he comes storming down here."

He picked up a blow torch and started the process of cutting one of the cylinders in half, making careful notes as he did.  
*****  
"Stark!" Hawkeye's bellow echoed from the hallway about an hour later. "What the fuck did you do to Bobbi?"

Tony didn't even look up from his workbench when the archer skidded to a halt in front of him, fists clenched.

"She judo chopped _me_ , Barton. Then she flipped out and ran away." 

Clint was snarling under his breath like an angry dog. "She's upstairs lying on the bed crying like a toddler. Can't even tell me what's wrong."

"From her immediate violent reaction to Mr Stark taking her weapon out of her hand, I would venture she is suffering from some form of post traumatic stress disorder, Mr Barton." Jarvis's voice was mild but pointed.

"What? Yeah, we know that, she's says it's been getting worse for a few days...you took her weapons? Wha...why would you do that?" Clint was coming down from his righteous rage slowly but surely, face going worried. He glanced up unconsciously, clearly wanting to get back upstairs to his wife.

Tony looked at him then gestured down at the bench. Both of Mockingbird's batons were laid out, cut in half neatly and expertly to reveal the inner workings. "They're trashed, Hawkeye. She needs new ones and she was babbling about making her own...please! As if I'm going to let her have the fun when I could be redesigning them for her. I can already tell where to improve the locking and blade mechanisms. How does she use them exactly?"

"Uh, extended single stick in each hand mostly--ever seen South East Asian stick fighting? She does that, but sometimes she locks them together and pole vaults or uses the blade ends like swords. She can throw them too, get a solid rebound."

"Okay, cool. I can make these about a thousand times better for that, pneumatic remote trigger, bells, whistles. Get her to tell me any other specifics when she's calmed down, okay? I should have a new set by tomorrow and once she approves them we'll whip up a bunch of spares."

Clint stared at him. "Tony? Did she hurt you? I'm...I'm sorry if she did." He sounded contrite and embarrassed.

Tony shrugged. "I've taken worse hits from my own armor, Barton; she pulled it. And I like her. She'd got some demons in that blond head of hers. I can relate. Go and make out with her or something, that'll get her mind off of it. I hope. If you're any good at it, anyway."

Clint retreated to the Nest after snarling at Tony one more time, collecting painkillers and bottled water on his way to the bedroom. Bobbi was curled up around a pillow, whimpering in the darkness. 

He sat down next to her and just rested one hand on her back. To his immense gratification and relief she instantly turned towards him, abandoning the pillow to clutch at his torso. He lifted her up, his powerful arms making her light as a child, and cuddled her into his lap. Clint nuzzled her hair, rumbling meaningless noises deep in his chest. She calmed slowly, her breath hitching and sighing.

When he pushed her head back a little and brought one of the lights up to dim he could see her face was red and blotchy, eyes looking like bullet wounds in her face. She'd cut one lip on the fabric of the pillow, blood crusting slightly.

_God, she's so beautiful._

"Tony says he's okay and he'll have a new set of batons for you by tomorrow and also he likes you. You able to talk at all? Or want to? S'okay if you don't; I've been there myself."

She sniffled and pawed at the end table for a tissue. "When I was on the run, I could suppress it all, you know? Always something to look out for, some danger, can't let up. Now I'm here, and you're here and most everyone in this place is being nice to me and I'm safe and...I can't suppress it anymore. I'm trying but once I cracked the dam..."

"The force behind it is too strong. Yeah, definitely been there."

"Started last night and I should have been more careful today. I woke up feeling good, relaxed, calm and then Stark grabbed the baton out of my hand and this memory surfaced of something..." She trailed off, her voice choked and uncomfortable. "I have something I need to tell you right now but I _can't tell you_ right now."

"Sounds pretty bad," Clint said, fighting with every ounce of strength to keep his voice casual. 

"It...yeah. It's really bad. It's..."

She was stiff and cold in his arms and he knew, knew down to the sick red fury blooming in the pit of his stomach, what she was going to say.

He wanted to shake her and scream _Who? Who was he? Where is he?_ and then find him, who ever he was, ex-boyfriend, enemy, stranger and murder him slowly with his bare hands, ripping off as many pieces as he could. Wanted to present her with the guy's god damn heart--or other body parts--on a tray.

But even if she told him--he had no right unless she asked him to. It was her right; he wasn't her owner to be offended or robbed of something precious. She didn't need him to defend her honor or protect her. She needed him to be the person for whom it didn't matter. She needed him to look at her with the same eyes no matter what she said.

He hugged her again, brushing her hair off her forehead with his lips and just holding her, lightly. She went even stiffer, then relaxed slowly. 

"Not right now, okay? Might be...a while, actually. I'm having a whiplash reaction in my head." She whispered and he knew she wasn't going to talk about it today. He'd wait. 

"Hey, I'm just holding my wife. I've got no ulterior motives here. When you want anything, you come to me and we'll pick it up, take as long as you need. Though...I can keep holding you? Nothing else, I swear."

She sighed and laid her head against his chest, nodding faintly. Slowly they started to breath in the same rhythm and he felt her calm even more. 

"Clint, you know the only time I'm not thinking about having sex with you is during the afterglow from just having had sex with you. I dream about having sex with you," she whispered, apropos of nothing.

He thought he knew what she was saying but there was a subtlety moving in her words that he couldn't quite reach...oh, right. _That's_ what she meant.

"Birdie, it's just...it's not always about sex, okay? You don't have to come on to me. You don't have to have sex just because I want to."

Her voice took on an exasperated edge, which made him smile. "Thank you for saying that because I was apparently born in the Middle-fucking-Ages and thought I'd become your chattel when we married, you Paleolithic thug."

"Those are different eras. I thought you were the smart one."

"You are such an asshole."

"People keep saying that and I don't see it. I'm charming."

"You're not charming, it's just that most people are afraid of you because you look like you can bend steel in your bare hands and everyone else gets one look at your chest and wants you to put those hands on their naughty bits."

"I can bend iron in my bare hands, does that count?"

"How do you just casually know you can do that?"

"Stark asked us all to try a stress test one day and I could do that. Steve can bend steel--Thor can SNAP steel. We all just assumed the Hulk could pulverize steel."

"Men and your fucking testosterone. All upper body strength and endurance; so annoying. Doing pull ups like it ain't no thing."

"I like your hormones just fine--do you hear me talking shit about estrogen?"

"Yeah, I got the ones that make me weepy once a month and make me retain fat like a deep fryer. To hell with them."

They were both half-giggling now. Clint squeezed her and got up off the bed. She sighed and lay back down. "I might nap, if that's okay. My head hurts, even with the painkillers. Haven't cried like that in a long time."

"'Course, I'll see what's in the communal freezer for dinner on my way back up from the gym."

"Way to make me feel like a slacker.

"You work out harder than I do. And also, you are not fat."

"I have lots of untapped potential in that area, Mr Barton. Thusly...I work out harder than you do."

"You can get fat if you want. I don't care."

"Thank you sport. For the record, I will be divorcing you the instant I can't see your ab muscles anymore. No pressure."

He picked up a pillow and lightly swatted her across the stomach with it, then he pulled off his shirt and pants and changed into sweats. Bare chested, contemplating a garish 'Cirque Du Soleil' shirt Nat had gotten him as a funny funny joke, he noticed she was studying him from under her eye lashes, so he turned to face her, showing off the aforemetnioned abs, the heavily muscled chest and arms like living steel.

"I wonder if I can get that on a t-shirt," Clint mused, casually, trying not to look like he was preening for her too much.

"What?" She said, sounding disinterested. Her tongue was flicking at her lips, though, like she was tasting the air.

"Paleolithic Thug. I like the ring of it."


	6. Let's Get Ready To Rumble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve. Bobbi. Duking it out.

The next morning, Clint slept very late. He was on night duty with Thor for the weekend and had to adjust his schedule. Bobbi had kissed him when she left the bed--they were still just holding each other at night--and been gone all day. He had a feeling she was camping out in the gym.

Turns out she was actually camped out on the communal floor, playing a FPS with Tony and Natasha. When he slouched down to the group kitchen to make coffee, he heard her yelling from the other end of room. 

"Strafe right damn it, Stark!"

"I told you to stay on the roof! For cover!"

"I'm not the god damn sniper, Natasha is!"

Steve was sitting with Bruce at the breakfast bar, looking down at an actual printed newspaper. "Well, she's got the lungs for battlefield command, anyway," he muttered, sourly, as Clint opened the fridge.

Clint studied him for a second over the fridge door then thought better of saying anything. He retrieved the milk and started the coffee percolating, humming to himself.

The digital noise of explosions and gunfire cut off. 

"Okay, okay, you were right on that one, Bobbi," Tony said.

"I did strat/tac analysis for SHIELD Special Ops for years, Tony."

"Oh?" Natasha chimed in. "When'd you start?"

"Five years before they found the ice man."

"That explains why our mission briefings got so much better around then."

"Well, thank you very much."

The three of them were walking towards the kitchen area as they talked. Thor followed them; he'd apparently been watching their online antics with some amusement.

"You still lost though," Steve said under his breath. There was a brief pause as everyone looked at him in mild amazement for the passive-aggressive mumble, then the world started back up again.

"Hi, sport," Bobbi kissed Clint lightly on the neck as he concentrated intently on his coffee. "I'm sorta a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none person," she continued, pouring a glass of water from the tap. "It's funny but looking around this room I can see basically every single person I've ever been second-best too."

Bruce glanced up from his Starktab. "Really?"

"Yeah." She pointed at Natasha. "Espionage."

"Marksmanship." Clint

"Science." Indicated both Stark and Banner.

"Hand-to-hand _and_ tactics _and_ strategy," with a thumb directed at Steve. 

"I didn't learn that stuff from books, so that makes sense," Steve glanced up long enough to glare at her, then went back to reading.

Bobbi skipped right over his rudeness. "You, Thor, no one would ever compare me too. So we're cool." 

The God of Thunder laughed. "I am much reminded of my father's Valkyrie when I contemplate you, Lady Barton. You would make a fine Asgardian."

"Aren't they supposed to be pure of heart or something?" Steve said, still looking down.

Before anyone had time to react--and both Natasha and Tony had their mouths open--Bobbi set down her glass, reached over and snatched the newspaper out of Steve's hands.

"Sorry, _Captain_ , couldn't quite hear you there?" she said through gritted teeth. 

He got off his stool with a very blank facial expression and tugged the paper out of her hand again. She was gripping it so tightly it ripped. He glared and threw his half down on the table in fluttering scraps.

"You heard me just fine," he said in a bland, level voice.

In the deep, dark silence filling the room they stared into each other's eyes, both looking for something. Steve started to speak again and Bobbi raised a hand up to her face.

The silence got a little darker and a little deeper. 

"Did...did your wife just give Captain America the finger?" Tony staged whispered to Hawkeye a heartbeat later, his voiced awed. "I've been wanting to do that for years."

"Yeah, she's a quick learner," Clint said at full volume.

Bobbi threw him a kiss and then looked back at Steve, her face going cold and hard.

"Right. That's it. You want to compare dicks, Rogers? Just _whip it out already._ Let's go; let's spar."

"I'm not going to fight you," Steve said, his voice dripping contempt.

"Oh for fu--look, we both know you'll go light. I'll call it a victory if I can get you not to pull a punch. But I'm not letting this go either." 

And she shoved him, both hands on his shoulders, sending him back a few steps. He staggered and froze, staring at her in surprised anger.

Clint straightened up from his casual slouch and moved to stand behind her, his eyes like a shark's. 

She shoved Steve again, slamming her palms into his chest, sending him back again. Steve grabbed at her hands.

He missed. She moved with smooth economy, not hurrying, just anticipating his motion. The slap across his face rang loud.

Steve's teeth slipped out in a snarl and she stepped back away from him, happy and satisfied. Clint draped an arm over her shoulder, grinning just a little.

"You're kinda scary right now. It's pretty hot," he muttered, sotto voce.

Bobbi rolled her eyes at him then looked back at Rogers. "Come on Cap. You think I have something to prove? I'll prove it on your ass, right now."

Steve pulled himself up to his full height, towering above Bobbi, who was not a small woman. "Fine. If that's what you want. I'm not going to be responsible for the consequences."

"Aw, Captain America just vaguely threatened me, achievement unlocked," Bobbi snorted, then high-fived Hawkeye.

Tony barked a laugh and then flinched back from the look Natasha gave him. "What? She's funny!"

"Com'on, little bird. Let's go down and get warmed up," Clint tugged her towards the elevator and then they were gone.

In the kitchen, Steve Rogers let out his breath. "I didn't mean...what the heck just happened?"

"Hawkeye's wife just picked a fight with you. Or you provoked her. Or something. Not sure, except I've got to go make sure the cameras in the gym are in good shape," Tony took off at a hop, grinning happily. Bruce and Thor followed him with a bemused look between them.

"Dr. Banner, is this some sort of challenge to the Captain's authority?" Thor asked as they waited for the elevator. "Does the Lady Barton seek to take the Captain's place as leader?"

"No. I think she's just a little fed up. Also, she and Clint are more alike than might be healthy."

"Ah. I remarked the same to her a few days past. That was the same as punching someone in the face, then."

"Yeah, pretty mu--"

The elevator door closing cut off the rest of the sentence.

Steve looked at Natasha. "Nat, should I be doing this?"

"You have to. If you don't show up now...it would be really insulting, at the least. I think--" She paused and shook her head. "Clint's proven he takes insults to her personally. They might just leave, Cap. I think if you treat her like this doesn't matter they'll think you don't respect either of them."

"I respect Hawkeye. I don't know her."

"Well, they're a matched set. Birds of a feather, really."

"How are you so calm now? I could tell when they came in you were just as upset as I was. You were the only person who's been taking this as seriously as it deserves."

"I spent some time with her; I'm willing to trust her provisionally. I think...I think she's a good person who's been through some bad stuff. Bad stuff that was our fault."

"What?"

"You saw the scar on her back?"

"Yeah...oh...HYDRA?"

"Combat shotgun. I checked the records, she was with five field specialists, high level combat operatives. She iced all of them with one working arm, then dragged herself off into the jungle to heal. Local police found the bodies the next day. It's all there on that data stick she threw me, a whole trail. She showed up in Italy covered in blood a few months later, no one ever found out why. I saw the picture the Poliza circulated of a 'Jane Doe' who disappeared from the hospital in Domodossola and it was definitely her. Earlier, she was kidnapped by an AIM splinter group during the Battle and escaped after being tortured for six days--that was probably an early attempt to stabilize Extremis via coersion. She took out two HYDRA facilities in Europe before Fury could even find them last year. She's...I think she might be the best pure fighter in this building, Steve. I think if you weren't enhanced, she'd run through you like a bulldozer."

"Oh. Well, I'm not going to be able to go full out against her, Nat. I'm not made that way."

She gave him a grave look that held a glimmer of humor. "You might have to remake yourself."

When Steve and Natasha made it down to the gym, Hawkeye and Mockingbird were running a rote punching drill that was too fast to really see properly for the most part. Thor, Tony and Bruce were chatting casually against the far wall. Natasha walked over to the couple and said something in a soft voice that made them both laugh and stop drilling. Steve walked stiffly to the men's change room and skinned out of his street clothes, feeling like a hundred kinds of fool the whole time. He desperately didn't want to do this; he didn't want to hurt or humiliate this woman.

In his own heart of hearts, he liked her too. Since he'd started following her dietary advice, his energy had tripled. He was sleeping better and everything seemed clearer, sharper.

When he came back out in a pair of long pants and a t-shirt everyone was staring at him. Bobbi was standing in the middle of the room, the back of her head against Hawkeye's chest and his arms around her middle. Her arms were hooked around his neck. They looked strong, graceful and content.

She smiled at him, wickedly. She had changed into her Mockingbird suit, the white and dark blue that was almost black.

"You ready to bang, Rogers, or you want to warm up?"

"Bang?"

"Fight, old man."

He glowered at her, turned his back on them all and warmed up just enough to make them all pay for staring at him.

When he turned back, Hawkeye was leaning casually against the far wall next to Nat and Mockingbird was pacing back and forth like a caged animal.

She smiled that wicked smile again and then bowed sharply from the waist.

"What kind of r--"

"Shut up and fight me Rogers."

She attacked him, moving across the space between them in a smooth economical motion that actually surprised him. Her first strike was a low sweeping kick that he stepped back to avoid...

...except that wasn't her first attack. It was her first feint, and it worked. 

She anticipated him with that same smooth economy, dropping into a sharp hook slide that took her out of his range and up behind his retreating foot.

She kicked him in the lower back, just above his kidney, flat and clean with the ball of her foot.

It actually staggered him.

Steve felt a surge of two emotions: admiration and anger.

He spun towards her, his hand snapping out to cuff at her head; he clipped her shoulder as she ducked back and sent her reeling away. 

"Way to hit a girl, Cap," Clint's voice floated sardonically across the room.

"Shut up sport, that's a good boy," Bobbi's cheerful voice returned, which got a laugh from the rest of the room.

Steve set his shoulders and got down to the fight. 

Within a few exchanges, he was beyond impressed with her abilities. Natasha's assessment was correct: lacking his speed, his strength, his uncanny coordination she wasn't just holding her own. She was going toe to toe as his equal. He figured it helped that she was so much smarter than he was; it also helped that he was aware how reluctant he was to hit her hard. She was using that against him, as any good fighter would, coming closer and taking more chances.

The fight was from the first moment a study in the use of tactics vs strategy on a micro level. He was all tactics, searching for the one thing that would let him end the fight without crippling her; she was strategy ninety percent of the time and whipping through a series of tactical choices fast enough to give him mental whiplash. She stayed out in kicking range for several passes, needling him to use his much longer range and then slipping inside it to hit a joint before dancing out again. Then suddenly she stayed inside, punching for his face and torso, changing elevation like a swooping bird. She didn't stay in long since his reactions got the better of him and he hammered in several solid punches, mostly to the side of her torso. The impact on her suit felt spongy so she had padding or armor built in.

He was glad. He was capable of killing someone with a punch--he knew he had more than once--and he hoped if he slipped and hauled off it would give her a margin of recovery.

She fought utterly unlike any woman he'd sparred/seen since he became Captain America. The women fighters he'd known in the war had been formidable, tough and utterly dependent on weapons. Would not even have tried to go toe to toe with any man, let alone a super human.

Natasha was all grace and speed, like fighting a killer ballet dancer. She flipped and kicked and spun and avoided, clever and deadly as her namesake.

This woman fought like--he couldn't avoid the comparison--she fought like a man, staying in to trade punches, blocking and parrying rather than ducking out of the way. She shed his blows smoothly, returning them in a direct, straight-forward fashion. More than once he saw a blow coming and still could only avoid it by invoking his enhanced reflexes. Her style was not one he'd seen before and in fact looked like an amalgam of several styles that she flowed through as the situation demanded, yoking tactics back into her strategy, playing one off the other. He was aware, as they fought, that she was setting him up for something but he couldn't find the shape of it in her blur of motion and technique.

He really, really wanted to sit down with her and talk about fighting. Find out where she had learned this stuff and what she could teach him.

While he was thinking about that, she jump roundhouse kicked him in the head, leaving the ground at the point of impact. So hard he actually greyed out for a second, reeling away from the blow.

So she kicked him in the head again, spinning like Natasha would have, like she never had to that point. He got one arm up for the third kick since he had exaggerated his second stagger, drawing her into it. He was going to grab her leg and throw her into a wall, so help him...

She swept his front foot out from under him, sending him stumbling and nearly falling to one side. Scattered applause drifted across the room from the watching Avengers.

At that point, Steve lost it a little.

He stopped trying to out think her and just started to react, his style losing its cohesion and becoming as chaotic and unpredictable as hers. He started to drive her back now, landing blows hard and fast. Blood spattered both of their faces, hers from a glancing blow that had slashed her bottom lip with her own teeth; his from a nearly broken nose, and it would have been pulped for a normal human. 

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, he realized he was having fun. Other than the under current of animosity, this was the most satisfying, interesting, exhilarating sparring session he'd had in years. The only people who'd come close were Clint and Natasha and both of them were locked up stylists, compared to her.

They split apart, after a particularly brutal exchange that had him shaking his left hand to get feeling back after a vicious lock, sharp pain lancing from a few fingers, and her holding her hip like she was trying to push the joint back into alignment. 

Her back to the watchers, he saw her studying his face and then smiling at him, a deep, warm, friendly smile--hands down the nicest expression either of them at ever made at each other. He started to grin just a little, his back straightening...

Mockingbird took two light fast steps towards him and planted her right knee on his bent thigh. Natasha would have pushed off, kicking him in the head on the way out; he turned into the motion, trying to wreck her angle.

His assumptions caught him again, third and last time. Mockingbird climbed him like a tree, hooking one leg over the top of his left arm, using both her hands to bend his hand back and in--the same hand and arm she had just numbed--against his own shoulder blade. Her momentum carried him forward, down to his knees and then his face.

He felt his shoulder wrench, on the verge of popping out, as they hit the ground. She sat up and leaned forward, his arm caught in a complicated lock that tightened as she shifted her weight.

That was the moment Hawkeye threw a knife at her.

It was small: a slim leaf-shaped blade made for combat. His underhand snap sent it straight for her head before anyone could react, though Natasha actually saw it leave his grip.

Bobbi turned her face into the path of the blade, looking straight at Clint and smiling. Tony, Thor and Bruce all stepped forward, exclaiming in horror and then choking into silence...

...as she plucked it out of mid-air, pulled Steve's head up by his hair and stabbed the point directly at his eye.

It stopped maybe half an inch away, hovering.

"Bang, Captain. You dead." Her soft voice was heavy with satisfaction, cruel humor and smug victory. It spread through the breathless air like a drop of oil onto the surface of a pond.

Clint started to cheer, whistling and hooting.

"Bartons for the win!" he yelled, moving towards his wife.

Bobbi leaned down and whispered into Steve's ear as she unkinked her legs, releasing his arm from its prison. "Sorry, Cap, for jumping you like that, but I had to stop you from setting any rules. No way could I have beaten you in a fair fight."

He rolled over onto his back and sat up, bringing his head level with her face where she still knelt. "I really don't know about that. And fair fights are for suckers."

She raised her eyebrows at him and he smiled slightly, where no one but she could see him. "Good isn't the same as nice, Bobbi."

"I just said that about you to Clint. Great minds, Steve."

"Great fight."

Then Clint had enveloped her in a bear hug, laughing and wrestling her to her feet.

"Come on, come on, Birdie! You're too awesome to sit on the floor with this mug, you need a hot shower. Come on!"

Jubilant, careless, Hawkeye pulled her out of the room, only leaving her a moment to wave and grin at the other Avengers, now coming forward to join Steve.

Then they were out in the hall and the Barton's cheerful expressions vanished. His grip on her shoulders went from hearty to supportive; she sagged against him the instant the door was closed, sobbing and clutching her ribs. 

"Oh, gods, he punches like a horse kicks," Bobbi gasped, then coughed into her palm. Her hand came away from her mouth in a smear of red. "I think I might lose a tooth."

"Stark's got great dental coverage, I'm worried about your ribs. I could almost see them cave in on one of those hits. I nearly screamed."  
Clint swept her into his arms as casually as you might pick up a stuffed toy. "Think we can duck in and out of medical before Bruce realizes we're there?"

"Just go to the Nest," Bobbi mumbled against his shoulder, her throat working as she tried not to vomit from the pain in her side and adrenaline withdrawal. "I laid in some medical supplies, one of those hand-scanners from the med bay. I don't think anything's broken."

Clint looked up at the sensor on the wall as the express elevator slid open. "Thanks, Jarvis. And how is nothing broken? He hit you harder than he hits _me_ sparring."

"This is my tac gear. It's reinforced, super Kevlar panels with kinetic dispersal. Without it, I'd be a bag of undifferentiated goo about now. With it, I'm just in a lot of hurt, but probably nothing permanent."

Clint leaned back against the railing on the wall, trying not to squeeze her as he supported her head.

"That was amazing by the way." His voice in her ear was soft and smooth.

"It was great--that was the most fun I've had since I went toe-to-toe with you." She smiled through the pain, her teeth washed with blood.

Clint's breath _wuffed_ out in surprised appreciation. "I love you, little bird. I've never met anyone like you."

"That's good because then you would be married to her--or him--and not me," she snuggled into his chest as the door opened and he carried her across the threshold of their home, intent on first aid.

Half and hour later, the Nest doorbell rang. 

"Yeah? Who's it?" Clint snapped. Bobbi was sitting on the coffee table, wrapping her ribs in a pressure bandage, not wearing anything but her boy short underwear. 

"Bruce," came the soft disembodied reply. "I wanted to...congratulate...your wife in person."

Bobbi grimaced at Clint. "Let'im in Jarvis." Then to her husband: "I figured he'd show up sooner or later."

Dr Banner advanced into the living room holding a medical case in one hand and wearing a sour, irritated expression. "I knew you'd taken that scanner but stop-gap first aid isn't going to help anything. Lie down and shut up. Both of you shut up. You don't get to talk to me after the stunt you just pulled."

"Uh, Bruce, she's--" Clint started to say.

"I've seen breasts before, Clint. And they're very nice but I'm really not concerned about them at the moment."

Meekly, Bobbi submitted to his full-body exam. Clint hovered and generally got in the way until Bruce hit him with a sharp glare from under his dark brows. Then he just hovered.

Bruce settled back into a chair after listening to her breathing and shook his head. "That suit of yours saved you from, conservatively, a flailed chest, a broken collarbone, a broken leg and bone bruises that would have gone down to the marrow. As it is, you're going to be hobbling around and popping painkillers like candy for a few days; no more than you deserve. What were you thinking?" 

"That I was tired of taking shit from the walking American flag."

To their surprise, Bruce nodded. "Yeah, and I get that. I just wish you'd picked some less...damaging...way to make your point." Though--and now he grinned"--the knife thing was brillllll-iant."

"My idea," Clint offered proudly. "It was Natasha's knife."

"She knew?" Bruce looked shocked. 

"Nah, I took it off her."

Bobbi smiled at him fondly. "He has lovely fast hands, Bruce."

"Fast, slow, any speed you like, birdie." The heat in the room ratcheted up about thirty degrees.

He glowered at them both. "Stop that."

"Nope!" They said simultaneously.

"Made for each other." He was gathering up his stuff, wiping his hands and the table of scattered blood droplets. Bobbi's ribs were expertly taped, as well as her right hand and an ankle. Her cuts were clean, her bruises just starting to turn. "Steve's in rough-ish shape too. You came within a hair of breaking his nose and you _did_ break two of his fingers."

Bruce looked over at them, both glowing despite her injuries and Clint's concern. "When I left him he sounded like a giddy teenager, going through the whole thing blow by blow. He was grilling Natasha about that flying omoplata you did on him--what? I trained with Rickson Gracie when I was in Brazil." He shook his head. "I know how to fight, even in this body but I do not...I do not understand how this much violence and pain could make anyone happy."

"It's sex, Bruce," Bobbi said casually, her eyes triumphant, gingerly working her arms into an over-sized shirt of Clint's.

"Sex?"

"Biochemisty of fighting and sex is the same, releases the same hormones. Sex is better cause it's all pleasure but any fighter who says they don't get turned on is lying to you."

Bruce looked at Clint, who nodded. "Not the life and death stuff, mostly, but stuff like this? Sparring and kicking around and it's all for fun and show? I fight through boners all the time."

"TMI times a million. That's just...you guys are weird."

"You've only got the anger part, Bruce. The rest of us are lucky, we get the whole package," Bobbi said. "Come on, admit you don't get science boners in the lab. _With Tony around_."

"Tony's a good looking guy, no shame in that," Bruce said casually.

Bobbi made a noise like _snork_. 

"Speaking of boners, though, Clint has to keep his to himself for at least a day. I'm worried you've maybe got a concussion and you need to actually rest. I refuse to believe either of you on spec that you wouldn't do something athletic and strenuous."

"Yeah. Not an issue," Clint sighed and rubbed his neck.

Bobbi winced and looked him with a sick expression. "I'm so sorry but...I'm still not...maybe another day would be best. I can...I can sleep in the living room."

"There's a spare bed--not the point. Said I'd wait for you, meant it. I'll be okay, stop _fussing_ about it, god, I was single for years before we met."

Bruce looked uncomfortable. "I should probably be going now, I didn't mean to get into something that's not my business."

Bobbi rose up, wincing, but standing tall. "Actually, I wanted to ask you--you ran blood work on me after that first night?"

"Yeah," Bruce said warily. "Was I not supposed to?"

"I'm glad you did. I assume nothing unusual?"

"Not at all, maybe you need more iron in your diet but that's normal for a woman your age. You're moronically healthy, other than the trauma injuries people like you pick up."

Bobbi ran a hand over her face. "I'll eat more steak," she whispered, and there were tears in her voice. Her hand had started to shake.

"And there's the adrenaline withdrawal fully kicked in," Bruce said mildly. "I'd get her into a warm bed, plenty of liquids, maybe a nice happy movie or something, Hawkeye."

"I can hold her?" the archer asked, his face very gentle, nearly as gentle as his hand on her cheek. She rested her own shaking hand over his, her cheeks wet and shiny.

"Doctor's orders--Cap said he'd take your shift tonight, Clint. Loser's forfeit he said. Later you two."

*****  
Bruce left the Nest and went straight to the infirmary, where the rest of the Avengers were still clustered around Captain America, his hand splinted and a burgeoning black eye turning an interesting shade.

"She's okay?" Steve asked anxiously.

"Steve she's--how do I put this delicately?--she's _fucked up_. Or she would be if not for the suit and the fact that you weren't actually trying to kill her. She'll be fine, but she's going to have memories in the form of bruises for a long time. Other than that, she's in good spirits and Clint's being a good boy so I'm not worried about them. But..."

"Bruce?" Natasha arched an eye brow at him.

"Something else going on there, between them, inside her head. She'd hurting over something, big and bad."

Natasha sighed and looked at Steve, then Tony, both of whom looked grave and worried. 

"You know what it is?" Bruce looked from one to the next.

Natasha shook her head. "Too many to chose from--and those are just the ones we know about."

"Oh." Bruce walked to the sink and started to wash his hands. "Well, that explains why she fits in so well around here."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the way, as a long time (25 years+) fighter with experience in multiple arts -- yeah, it is the way Bobbi and Clint describe to Bruce. 
> 
> I've wrestled guys with boners and I've had the lady equivalent while fighting myself. It's the most fun you can have with your clothes on. 
> 
> Also, google "flying omoplata" -- done right it's like sorcery.


	7. In the Still of the Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning -- Implied Sexual Assault (Past)
> 
> Bobbi finally tells Clint why she beat up Tony. This Clint is not a worthless asshole about it like they made 616 Clint be (for no good reason). 
> 
> Steve is REALLY NAUGHTY.

On night shifts like tonight, or when Steve just couldn't sleep, he would go out onto the communal deck and lie in one of the insanely comfortable pool recliners Stark owned and look at the stars. There seemed to be fewer of them than he remembered but he figured it was skyglow from the city.

Same number of stars, just more light. More people.

Though he loved the stars, it brought him comfort to be surrounded by light and life.

He'd sketch a little: the city skyline at night, the constellations as they wheeled overhead, scenes from battles or daily life that had imprinted themselves on his inner eye. His senses were so acute he didn't need anything but the night sky and the city lights to draw by. He could hear the other Avengers, sometimes, if they left their windows open, since the communal floor was the bottom of the residential block in the Tower. Tony and Pepper play-fighting or talking business, both speaking in rapid legalese. Bruce playing music. Until recently Thor and Hawkeye playing video games. Natasha dancing, the soft _tap-tap_ of her slippers on the wooden floor Tony had installed for her.

So he knew the instant Clint padded barefoot into the living room and sat down in the darkness; he knew them all by the rhythem of their feet, walking, running, fighting. If he'd turned on the light, Steve would have stood up and joined him, but he figured the archer wanted his privacy for some reason. 

Then a strange, second set of bare feet entered the room. Light, firm, decisive.

Natasha?

No, the other woman.

"Hey little bird, did I wake you? I'm sorry." Clint's voice was very soft and had the clipped remnants of his mid-western accent.

"I don't know. I just swam out from under the c-c-c-covers and you w-w-w-were gone and I got _sssss_ cared." Bobbi sounded almost like a child, open and vulnerable and tentative. He'd heard that stutter before; his instinct to reveal himself died.

There was a complicated noise that Steve thought was Clint pulling her onto the couch with him. She spoke again, her voice still utterly unlike her brash 'public' persona, sounding muffled. She probably had her head up against his chest.

"N-n-no, you don't have to c-c-c-comfort me, Hawky. If you need to be alone, I can leave you alone. I'm not a little k-k-kid."

"I married you because I don't want to be alone anymore, birdie. I just sorta forgot that for a minute. For the record, I left because I was going to toss and turn--overslept for nights--and I didn't want to wake you, not because I didn't want to be with you."

"I'd r-r-r-rather you woke me up."

"Have you always had that stutter when you're freaked out? I've been wondering."

"Wh-wh--" the was a sound like she had punched a cushion on the couch and when she started speaking again, she was being very intense about her pronunciations. "When I was a k-kid I got beaten up a lot. I had a mouth on me even then--it was my only defense--and sometimes I would be saying stuff so fast I'd stammer and stutter. I learned how to fight and I trained myself not to trip on my own tongue but I still stuttered when I was mad or scared. I talk a lot now when I'm fighting because I'm showing my brain it's not the boss of me. I was over it for years but--"

"It started up again when you were on the run," Clint stated baldly.

"Yeah."

They sat together in glum silence for a long while.

"Clint, I know you have nightmares. I've only been mostly exhausted when we go to sleep."

"Huh. I'm not working hard enough then."

"Clint, don't. You don't need to joke with me, okay? Deal?"

"I know, little bird. But I can't break thirty years of habit in less'n a week."

"Just so's you know it, is all."

"Well, you don't have to be strong all the time, either little bird, okay?"

"I'm not. I'm really, really not." She sighed again. "I know you said don't fuss but I feel sick about my...about not being able t-t-t-t-o..."

"Okay you massive idiot, listen to me when I say this: if we never have sex ever again, I will still stay married to you."

"I would never do that to you!"

"But if you did, if something happened to one of us and we couldn't? I'm not leaving and if you leave I will come after you."

"Did you just threaten to stalk me if I leave you?"

"Yup."

They both made snorting noises, not quite laughing.

"I'm okay with that. I mean, if you were _actually_ stalking me I'd just break your legs, mind." Bobbi finally remarked. "But I like thinking you'd come find me if I got lost...in a metaphysical sense. I can handle the geography myself."

"If I had to walk every inch of the planet, I'd find you. With broken legs."

There was a long silence. Bobbi sniffed once or twice, like someone trying not to cry. 

"Can I ask you something about that thing we're not doing right now? I don't want to torment you or anything..."

"Well, little bird, when a man and a woman are married and love each other very much--Ow!"

"You deserved that."

"Yeah, I did."

"How do you do it, anyway?"

"Do what?" Clint's voice was wary.

"Clint. Stop being a dipshit. You know you're a sex god."

Clint started to laugh and couldn't stop: not wildly but deep in his belly. 

"Quit that!" Bobbi said in a peeved voice and there came another punching noise, but softer.

"What brought that on?" Clint choked out, still giggling.

"Well, I was talking to Natasha about you--"

The laughter stopped abruptly.

"That's the most terrifying thing anyone has ever said to me," Clint sounded like his hair was standing on end.

"Yeah, well, comparing notes...your 'quickies' are longer than most guys can go in a night."

"I'm not so sure--"

"We had sex what? Dozens of times in the first four days we were married?"

"This is a problem?"

"Not in the fucking slightest. I just don't know how you do it without drugs or implants or something. There are physical limits for men."

"Oh, well, I'm a sniper," Clint said causally, the chuckles coming back. There was anticipatory silence from Bobbi...then another punch.

"Please explain that, oh guru of love." Bobbi voice was dripping menace.

"Focus, little bird. S'all about focus."

"And?"

"Well, the more I'm into--ha, double entendre--a woman the--"

"Harder it is to focus, yeah, yeah."

"What? No, the easier it is."

"Easier?" Bobbi sounded as perplexed as Steve felt.

Steve was also feeling desperately embarrassed and like a complete heel for eavesdropping but he could not face the idea of standing up and saying anything. Could not do it. 

Plus the whole conversation was both fascinating and...well...titillating. He'd never gotten to participate in stuff like this as a kid--too unpopular and inexperienced--and when he was Captain America he was too busy fighting a world war. He'd heard Natasha make oblique references to Clint's prowess more than once and it had been open gossip around the S.T.R.I.K.E. team that Hawkeye was considered the stud of studs in SHIELD. 'All the tail he could pull' was the phrase Rumlow used once. Steve had been openly displeased by the disrespect...and silently wondering if he could pick up some pointers. He really didn't know if he was very good at it... 

"Yeah, it's how I know who to hang around with. The more I can focus when I'm around someone...If I can focus on my shooting, it means I'm not worried about my backup or if I can rely on people. I knew in that fight in the warehouse, when you were calling quadrants for me--perfect fucking quadrants, in the pitch black, perfect timing, how could you have known my draw like that, seriously?--I was so focussed it was, you know, zen archery. I felt the same way about the others, during the Battle. The rest of the crap dropped away and I was just...Hawkeye."

He audibly shifted her around on the couch and she sighed heavily, a small content noise like a settling child.

"I like women, little bird. I _love women_ , you know that. And the few times I've ever had anything serious with a woman, it was someone I could focus around."

"Few times?"

"Twice, I guess. Nat--obviously. First time I ever really felt it was with her, I just turned into a laser inside my head. It was...like being drunk without drinking. You know, when you're just buzzed enough that everything looks totally clear? I thought it meant I was in love with her."

"Oh."

"Get that fucking look off your face, Bobbi. You have got to deal with that stupid paranoia, like, now. I saw it once before and I wanted to slap you, I swear."

"You l-l-l-l-love her." She sounded sick and scared, but not surprised.

"Yeah, I love her. She's my partner and my best friend. But I love Steve and Tony and Thor and Bruce too and I don't want to fuck any of them."

Steve twitched. Had Clint just said that? Really?

"Not even Steve? He's really hot." She sounded more like herself--and how had he come to know what she _should_ sound like?--her voice dripping sincerity. 

Also: she thought he was hot? He twitched again, feeling a small amount of warmth spread in his gut. He'd done nothing but insult her, interrogate her and beat her up and she thought he was hot?

The punching noise came again and this time she yelped. "Fair's fair, I don't get to say that stuff, neither do you."

"You know I'd never--" Bobbi's voice was deadly serious again, small and contrite.

"Yeah, I do know. I know because you're the only other woman who's ever made me feel that kind of focus and I figured out what caused it. Trust. I can focus like that when I trust someone. With you it's times a million. How can I keep everything...up...for so long with you? And get there so often? Because with you, little bird, I can feel every damn millimeter of your skin on mine and it feels so good I want it to last forever. So I take that focus you give me just by being in the room and...make it useful for something other than just killing. It's why the way Steve was treating you made me so damn crazy."

The next sound Steve heard was Bobbi crying, softly and gently. "It shouldn't always be that though, okay?" she snuffled. "I want you to just be...just let go sometimes, right? Do that more. It's not about me all the damn time."

"Do I seem like I'm not having fun, you little idiot?"

"Yeah, when you wake up choking and trying not to cry on me," Bobbi said in a flat, dead voice. "Like tonight Mr. Overslept."

"I could say the same of you, little bird. Only one of us is crying out names in their sleep." He stopped and the silence was pregnant with dread. "Bobbi, tell me about Lincoln Slade---hey hey, calm down, calm down. Fuck, fuck fuck, calm down. _I know who he is._ "

"H-h-h-how?" Bobbi's voice was hysterical, frantic. She sounded like she was standing, and then Clint did too.

"Nat was going through the files you gave her and noticed a few things. Yeah, she and I were talking about _you_ , scary isn't it? Hey? Scary, right?" Clint's voice was gentle and entreating, soft as the warm wind blowing over the deck.

"Wh-wh-wh-what did she s-s-s-s-say about h-h-h-h-him?"

"Nothing really. She didn't know the name, she just saw some weird holes in your history, wanted me to be aware of them. But I'm not _dumb_ little bird. I've seen women--hell, rescued them--who've been...hurt like that. And I can put two and two together and get at least fifteen and that's why I've been trying not to come up behind you, or take anything sharp out of your hands; I'd have warned Stark if I'd figured it out sooner. Hey, hey, little bird, little bird, it's an important thing but I don't fucking care. I don't care, except that he hurt you and I want him dead. How he hurt you doesn't fucking matter. I can't hate this guy _more_. If he'd just said mean things to you I'd want to tear him apart. I was going to wait for you to tell me on your own but when I asked Nat about it...well, she said you might not ever. Cause you'd think it made you a victim or some moronic shit like that."

"I...I..." Bobbi was panting frantically, like a trapped animal. "I, yes...victim, weak, d-d-d-d-d-d-dirty, all that..."

"Never. Never. Not ever." Clint's voice was so fierce it was chilling. "No matter what happens to you, not ever. You kicked the shit out of _Captain America_. You're not invulnerable but you couldn't be weak on the worst day of your life."

"I'm s-s-s-s-sorry, I should hhhhhhhhave..." her voice descended into inhuman noises, a breathless wail. 

"You don't have to tell me. You don't have to tell anyone. But I think you should, if you can. Just me, maybe?" He was coaxing her. "Just the broad details?"

Her breathing was panicked but Steve heard her start to pace, and the story dripped from her mouth, a few broken words at a time. She was concentrating so hard the stutter was mostly gone, her voice robotic and flat. There were as many holes as answers but just hearing what he did made Steve want to leap to his feet and find someone, anyone who could tell him where the man was...so that he could help Hawkeye rip him to shreds and burn the pieces.

"It was after...after my team turned on me. I had n-n-never...been so alone. To SHIELD I was a t-t-t-t-traitor, to Hydra I was still SHIELD and the government was h-h-h-hunting me as both. I got on a transatlantic boat crew, to h-h-h-heal and wound up in Europe, in Germany. Got t-t-t-t-trapped there, thought I got lucky when I found...him. Phantom Rider, they called him. C-c-c-c-could get people in and out of anywhere. I was hurt and tired and scared and I...I shouldn't have trusted him. Shouldn't have d-d-d-d-dropped my guard. He drugged me, took me to a cabin in Italy and..."

Her voice failed in retching sobs.

"Can I hold you? Please can I?" Clint was audibly crying now too, his voice thick and tortured.

"Nnnnno. Don't. Not. Now."

It sounded like she ran over to the bar sink and dry-heaved a few times. When she continued her voice was fainter and muffled, as though her head was down.

"It was days, at least. I think. So d-d-d-d-drugged up couldn't 'member my own name. Only mercy in it, it's a fog. A haze. He was...crazy. K-k-k-kept screaming at me to say I was his wife. H-h-h-h-hurt me when I didn't. Was worse when he was trying to be nice 'cause that's when he'd--" She retched again. "Don't even know h-h-h-h-how many times--"

"Once was his death sentence," Clint snarled.

"Might _be_ dead. Not sure. I...the drugs lost some ef-f-f-f-f-fect after a few days and I sorta woke up...we fought, I must have hurt him because I got away, covered in blood. His blood. Woke up in an Italian hospital, Jane Doe. Snuck out when I could walk. N-n-n-never found the cabin again. Kept an ear out for him; nothing." Her voice grew as fierce as his, and steadied. "He's _mine_ , Clint. He turns up and you kill him without telling me I will rip off your face and feed it to flies."

"Can I hold him down while you do that to him?" 

"Yes. And can you...hold _me_ now?"

They seemed to sit down on the couch. "Clint, what wakes you in the night? You say 'blue' sometimes." Bobbi's throat sounded raw and hoarse.

Clint coughed. "You know what happened to me during the Invasion?"

"No. I was in...during the actual Invasion I was being held captive by A.I.M. they were trying to torture me into helping stabilize Extremis and oh, fuck, I sound like a perpetual helpless loser now, don't I? Then after I was in a private hospital up state, courtesy of Fury, getting my head and body put back together. Then I was out in the field till...SHIELD fell."

Now _he_ spoke in fits and starts, a few sentences following each other but sometimes in lengthy, if limping, monologue. He told her about the attack on the mesa, about Loki reaching into his head and chaining his will to the god's. About killing other agents, about shooting Fury, about the theft of the iridium, more deaths. The attack on the Helicarrier, the damage caused with clinical precision. Fighting Natasha, trying to kill her. Helping Loki get free, and knowing he then killed Coulson. The Invasion itself she knew about, of course.

By that point in the story, they were both crying again. Bobbi had apparently known and liked Phil.

"Sometimes I dream I'm looking in the mirror and watching my eyes go black and then blue again. And I can hear that fruity laugh and I think I have to kill myself before he takes me over again. I have to kill myself; it's the only way to be sure he won't use me to hurt the rest of the team. Tonight...tonight I thought...what if he made me hurt you? He told Natasha he'd use me to torture her...what if he had me...do things...to you?" Clint's voice was the robotic one now, but it held a depth of agonized terror Steve had never heard. 

They all knew the archer was scarred inside from what Loki had done to him but he'd never realized it was still an open wound.

"Don't--"Bobbi choked on her own words"--please, even if something like that happened. Don't kill yourself. I'd find a way to get you free."

"Nat just hit me really hard in the head," he snuffled and nearly laughed.

"I'd find a non-concussion-y way to get you free," Bobbi said firmly, then made a pained noise. "My ribs are killing me. I hate almost throwing up nearly as much as actually barfing."

"It's been a while since I cried like that. My eyelids feel like sandpaper now," Clint muttered. 

"Thank you. For crying like that, in front of me. For not being a macho asshole about having human emotions."

"I'm an emotional guy. Mostly angry, hungry and horny, I admit."

"Hungry is not an emotion, Clint," Bobbi noted, dryly.

"Tell that to my stomach."

"Horny is not an emotion either."

"Tell that to my di--ah, fuck, sorry. I'm a crass moron, sorry."

"No. 'Sokay. I like your dick. I wouldn't put my hands or my mouth on it unless I liked it a lot. But I think it's going to be...untouched for a little bit longer. I'm still all torqued around inside."

"I shouldn't have made you talk about it," Clint said in some distress.

"I could have said no. Actually, I think...it helped. It was something I felt like I should have told you before we got married and I've been feeling like a liar, a fraud, and totally fucking terrified of what you'd say. Lots of guys would have blamed me, you know."

"And I would like to punch all those guys in the face. Morons." He paused, and his voice went a little dead again. "Lots of the other agents blamed me...after...and it's...I couldn't do that to you. I wouldn't do that to anyone; I think I have in the past and it's killing me I'll never get a chance to make it right."

"I wish you had no frame of reference for what I went through."

"It's not the same, not at all."

"No. What Loki did to you was worse. At least I mostly can't remember it clearly."

"It was not worse."

"Not a contest, sport."

"True," Clint agreed, and then it sounded like they both stood up again. "Back to bed? We can lie there staring at the ceiling together while holding hands."

"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams," she murmured.

"Hamlet," Clint said, then paused, expectantly.

"Yeah, it was...what?"

"This is the point people usually express surprise that I've read...well, nearly anything."

"Clint, you can fly how many different kinds of aircraft?"

"Two."

"And you're one of the best tacticians SHIELD ever had, right?"

"I guess."

"How many languages do you speak?"

"Well? Three but I can struggle to be understood in Russian."

"You are not stupid. I know people have told you you're stupid your whole life. You're not stupid. Do I seem like the kind of person who would marry a stupid guy?"

"Well, yeah, but that was because I'm so incredibly sexy. Clouded your intellect."

She laughed, shakily. "You know, for the first few hours I knew you that wasn't far from the truth. I thought you were exactly what you pretend to be--a simple-minded killer."

"And also incredibly sexy?"

"Oh, soooooo incredibly sexy."

"What made you change you mind?"

"Being on the run with you. No stupid person is that mentally mobile, that quick on the uptake, that creatively annoying. When I didn't want to kick you in the nuts I wanted to rub myself on you like a cat. I...it was the first time I'd felt like since...I'd been so scared he'd broken that part of me, that I'd never _want_ again. And then I wanted you. Falling in love took about half a day longer."

"Wow. You're slow."

"Huh?"

"You had me at 'Punch me!'."

"I feel this exchange may explain our relationship a little too well."

"We are very blessed, little bird."

Their combined laughter faded into the sound of the elevator.

Steve waited till he was sure they were gone and then stood up. His stomach was turning, frothing with a mix of anger, distress and anxiety. They were going to _murder_ him when they found out he'd heard that whole conversation. He should have said something right away.

But he was glad to know about what she'd been through. He was glad to know Clint was still traumatized by his possession. He was glad to have heard them both so naked and afraid. So loving and protective. His animosity towards Bobbi had been wiped away by their battle royale--one of the paradoxes of being a fighter. What was growing in its place now was a solid base of respect: for her mind, for her guts, for her resilience. Now he needed to fill in some of the blanks he'd been determined to ignore.

Steve went into the living room, flicked on the shared computer and pulled up his private cloud storage. Natasha had put the info she'd pulled off of Mockingbird's drive onto his account too.

Starting from the first entry, he began to read

_Date: [Redacted]_

_Initial Field Assessment: Morse, Barbara "Bobbi"_

_Morse would appear to be a prime candidate for transition to full, active field work. Her evaluations within the Science Division are exemplary and her preliminary Physical scores are in the top one percentile of all active agents..._


	8. Origin Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bobbi talks about her past. And why Steve Rogers is so damn special.
> 
> And then she and Nat get really, really drunk.

Tony was reviewing the footage of the Steve/Bobbi throwdown for about the tenth time in twenty-four hours, a huge shit eating grin on his face, when Bruce wandered into the lab.

"You getting tired of that yet?" Banner asked, a little sourly.

"Never. I may play this in a loop in my living room for the rest of my life. Especially the bit where she makes him flail and stagger like he's drunk."

Despite his outward disapproval, Bruce watched the recording until the end as well. 

"She's got pretty fabulous technique. She should go test for her BJJ black belt," he mused when it looped back to the beginning, turning to his own work station.

"I didn't know they gave out belts in that...would Hawkeye have to swear a deposition or something?"

" _B_ razilian _J_ iu _J_ itsu, Tony, not--"

"I know, I tease, I tease. I do MMA," the billionaire grinned at him and reluctantly turned off the recording. His email program popped up automatically, showing a flashing line marked 'Spam' in big red letters in his Urgent folder. He deleted it, muttering, "I'm going to design a virus that turns the toasters of everyone who sends that stuff into flamethrowers."

The 'Spam' email popped back onto his urgent folder.

"The fuck?" Tony hissed, leaning into the screen. He glanced over at Bruce's station and saw the same email there, too.

Steve stuck his head in the door, holding his personal Starktab. "Hey, I must be doing something wrong, this email won't delete."

"Yeah," Tony muttered, pulling up the background code for the program. "It's all your fault, go away and think about what you've done."

Advancing into the room, Steve threw an inquiring look at Bruce.

"No idea. I've got it too," the man who contained the Hulk said with a shrug.

"Actually, Dr Banner, that email has appeared in the inbox of all the Avengers. Sent from a multitude of different locations; I cannot trace it," Jarvis intoned, sounding perturbed.

Tony pulled up the email itself into its own window. It looked like a standard 'increase your penis size' spam, rife with misspellings and a word salad in the body of the message. He was looking back and forth from the email to the base code, his expression growing increasingly intrigued.

"Hey, you two, make yourselves useful: either of you see a pattern in that message? Cause I'm seeing something in the background here that's pretty weird and it's making an interesting repeat loop."

"A virus?" Bruce asked, moving over to Tony's desk.

"Nah, wouldn't have made it through the first layer of Jarvis' security. It's like someone is using the email to piggyback a data feed but I can't find a hook to reach in and fish it out."

"Speak English, Stark," Steve ordered. But he was smiling a little as he said it.

"Looky at the pretty flashy things and tell me what you see, Capsicle." Tony grinned back.

All three of them studied the words, Steve's cheeks flushing a little at the graphic nature of most of them.

"Hush," Bruce said suddenly. 

"I'm not talking!" Tony said in an aggrieved tone.

"No, look, every line contains 'hush'."

"Oh, yeah," Steve leaned in. "And 'baby'."

"Thanks guys." Tony started typing rapidly into the window with the base code. "There's a third point but I can find it with the other two...ah, look, it's 'little'. And et voila!"

With a flourish, Tony pulled up a third window and tapped it dramatically. An image appeared in the window: a scrolling list of chemicals. Then another list next to it, just four capital letters in random order, G A T C.

"There's more data here but...what does that look like to you?" Tony muttered to Bruce.

"DNA base pairs and organic chemistry...but really really weird organic chemistry."

"Are you two pranking me?" Steve said. "This looks like gibberish."

"It's the building blocks of life itself," Bruce said. "It kinda is gibberish, but it's really important gibberish."

Tony was diving deeper into background of the message. "I'll be damned. I think Fury sent this--you said he was going to Europe, right Steve?"

"He said he was so he's probably in South America," Steve said sourly. "So, what's it mean?"

"No idea," Tony said cheerfully, then exchanged a significant look with Bruce. "I'm an engineer, I have actual skills. Bruce's a physicist, so he can't really _do_ much but he looks good."

"Love you too, Tony," Bruce said mildly. "This stuff is all biochemistry, Steve."

"You two can figure out anything, I've watched you do it," Steve retorted. 

"Weeeeeelllll, as it turns out we have in house the leading expert on this stuff," Tony wound up drawling, still studying the screens intently. 

Rogers sighed and narrowed his eyes. "Quit being coy, which of you is it?"

Bruce and Tony exchanged another look. Tony pointed to the ceiling. " _She's_ upstairs possibly playing naked Twister with Hawkeye."

"Mockingbird?"

"Bobbi, Steve. Her name's Bobbi," Bruce said patiently. 

Steve grunted, not even sure himself why he was still having trouble using her name sometimes.

"Hang on--Mockingbird," Bruce exclaimed, sitting up and looking at the original email again. "'Hush'. 'Little'. 'Baby'." He started to sing, softly and surprisingly well. " _Hush little baby, don't say a word, papa's going to buy you a..._ "

"Mockingbird." They all finished the lullaby at the same moment.

"Jarvis, open a line to the Nest please...unless it's a bad time," Tony ordered.

"Not at this precise second, Mr Stark. Mockingbird is...reading to Hawkeye."

"Reading what? Playboy?" Tony snorted.

" _From Here To Eternity_ , Mr Stark."

The line opened and they could hear Bobbi's throaty voice reading something lyrical and smooth, words like drops of honey and cream.

"...and the nervousness dropped from him like a discarded blouse, and he was suddenly alone, gone away from the rest of them..."

"Bobbi? Clint?" Stark said, reluctantly. 

"WHAT?" The joined voices of the Bartons rang loud through the room. 

Bruce snorted and took his glasses off to polish them.

"Stay right where you are, Stark, I'll be down to murder you in the face directly, I was at the bit where Prewitt is starting to play Taps and you wrecked it." Bobbi snarled. 

In the background, Hawkeye muttered "Just when we were both finally relaxing, damn it..."

"That'd be okay," Stark said in a mild voice. "Since we need you down here in the lab anyway."

Silence stretched for a moment. "The lab? W-why?" Bobbi's voice was now less enraged. 

Steve heard the suppressed stutter and knew she was frightened.

"Fury's sent some data from, well, could be almost anywhere that's right up your alley, and the message attached strongly suggests he knows you're here and wants you to look at it."

"Data from Fury? I..." The next silence stretched for so long they all looked at each other, wondering if she'd cut the call. Then Clint spoke, very soft and low.

"Little bird, you don't have to do any damn thing for Fury...or Stark...or me...or anyone."

Bobbi's response was so faint it was barely audible. "No. I gotta...it's time you all got an explanation. We'll be down in minute."

They arrived together, dragging Thor and Natasha in their wake. Clint was wearing casual clothes and a bemused expression but Bobbi was in her full tactical gear, her goggles on her forehead and a digital camera clutched in one hand.

"What's up with?" Stark gestured at her outfit and got silence in response. Bobbi very deliberately placed the digital camera on an empty table and walked over to Tony's terminal.

Looking over his shoulder, she speed-read the first page and then flicked through the rest of the data. The rest of them talked of inconsequential things, but for Bruce who alternated between staring at her and staring at the data.

After about fifteen minutes she nodded, firmly. With a sigh, she sat down in the nearest chair and rubbed her forehead. "Okay, yeah, Fury knows I'm here and that was for me, thanks for noticing."

She looked up, smiling wryly when she saw the Avengers had unconsciously lined up facing her, then caught Natasha's eye. "You asked what I was doing with that strike team before I got shot in the back? Collating data on that project." She gestured at the screen; Natasha looked it over and made a startled sound.

"What?" Bruce said, looking somewhere between annoyed and surprised that she had apparently seen something he hadn't.

"I don't understand the science...but I've seen those results before." She looked up at Steve directly. "I've seen them in your file."

Steve's stomach dropped. "My file? Oh--No."

Tony made a "Ah-Ha" sound. Clint slapped himself in the face and made an abortive move towards Bobbi that she waved off. Bruce looked back at the data, startled.

"Forgive me, but I do not understand?" Thor rumbled.

"My file," Steve gulped. "The Super Soldier serum. She was working on the Super Soldier serum."

They'd told Thor all about the project that had created two of the Avengers, one by accident and one by design. And they all knew now about the disparate attempts over the years to re-create the serum: all disasters of various levels of spectacularly destructive.

"You must have seen the data, why the hell would you want to be involved?" Steve snapped, his voice rising, then cutting off. He was standing very still and very straight which they had all come to realize was his default 'I'm really mad and I'm afraid to touch anything because I will break it, puny mortals' stance

They all expected Bobbi to yell back at him; she didn't. She just looked down at the floor and nodded.

"You're right. I knew the whole project was a mistake; I was hoping collecting all the stupidity together would convince Fury to shelve it permanently. But the prime mover behind my mission wasn't Fury, was it?"

Steve and Natasha exchanged appalled looks. Of course, it must have been a HYDRA project.

"Here's the thing...I realized half way through the year and a bit I estimated it was going to take to get all the data together that I was in the middle of something unique. I had access to stuff none of the other projects had been able to see. I had all the stuff SHIELD had over the years, stuff from what I know now was HYDRA's files. I had stuff from Stark databases that I think Stane sold to a middle eastern magnate before he died." Tony winced and fidgeted. He still didn't know how much Starktech had been skimmed off to undesirables while he was building armor in a cave. "The lab I was in when I was...ambushed by my own team was the last one; the last data set we were going to need to complete the project."

She stood up, still not looking any of them in the face. Clint's expression was eloquent with love, pain, and more than a little fear.  
Bobbi paced a few steps back and forth in front of the table holding the incongruous little digital camera, clutching at her own torso like she was protecting herself. Her left shoulder was hunched forward and her right hand was rubbing at it unconsciously; she was still recovering from the fight.

Clint and Steve could hear the cool precision of her speech patterns; this was a woman under rigid self-control.

"I was actually back in the States on a break when I found something, in a freaking pharmacy basement in New Jersey, that I know for a fact no one else has seen: Erskine's original notebooks. Towards the end of the last one, he talked about you, Steve."

She looked Captain America in the eye then and her face was like an open wound: raw and horrifying.

"He knew goddamn well what a gem he had in you and he actually said he was never going to repeat the process on anyone else once he'd 'balanced the ledgers'. I think he meant, made a hero to oppose the monster that was Red Skull."

"Do you still..."

"Yeah, they're in a safety deposit box in Montreal under one of my aliases. Once I can travel into Canada again, I'll get them and give them to you. He...he seemed to think of you almost as a son, you know." She offered that in a small voice, timidly.

"So, Erskine knew how dangerous the process was?" Bruce asked.

"More than that...he knew what it did, in a way that no one else really every grasped. It doesn't just enhance your body, it enhances everything about you. Imagine every personality trait turned up to max, encased in a super strong, super fast, super sensitive perfect human shell." She looked at Hawkeye. "Imagine total precision, perfect focus...total arrogance, perfect self-doubt." He jerked and stared at her, his face frozen.

Black Widow. "Cunning, controlled, charming...ruthless, manipulative, mendacious." The redhead nodded, calm and accepting.

Iron Man. "Quick-witted, charismatic, confident...reckless, self-absorbed, self-destructive."

Bruce Banner. "Brilliant, wise, disciplined...furious, unstoppable, destructive." Banner took off his glasses and polished them again, nervously.

"Don't know it if would work on you Thor, but...gods...you turned up to eleven would probably mean Ragnarok was nigh."

"Agreed, my lady."

"And me...resourceful, perceptive, bright." She wrapped her arms tighter around her body. "Callous, calculating. Cold-blooded."

She looked Steve in the face again. "You weren't just one in a billion, Steve, you were unique. You might be the only person EVER who could be trusted with the power you have. Humanity got so lucky when Erskine saw you that day, we have no idea. But we can't make more of you. The only thing the Super Soldier program can make now is...monsters. An army of super-powered monsters. And I knew damn well I was not going to be part of that, but I keep getting thrown back in. The serum is what made Mockingbird in the first place--no not like that." She shook her head at Steve's intake of breath. "I'm not enhanced. I've just got history with it. Let me tell you all a story."

Clint held up his hand. "They don't need to hear it."

"They do. We're never going to get over these issues without...you all know each other's origin stories, it's time you heard mine."

Bobbi started to pace. "I was born in Long Beach, my parents were oil company scientists, a geologist and a chemist. Brilliant, brilliant people; modeled their moral and ethical lives on vultures, but great with the science. When I was six we moved to the Philipines, to Manila. My parents dumped me in an ex-pat American boarding school and I saw them maybe twice a year. To this day, I have no idea why they even had a child. I guess it was just what you did back then."

She smiled sadly at all of them. "In the 'shitty childhood' Olympics in this room, I'm in the bottom two with Thor, I know. But it wasn't great either. I used to get beaten up all the time: I was mouthy, awkward and had an overdeveloped sense of 'fair'. I had two safe places, the library and the science lab; pretty soon I was getting beaten up for being the smartest kid in the school too. Then when I was nine they hired this local guy to run gym classes and he was an escrima guru outside of the school. He started to teach me to fight. By the time I was twelve I could take anyone in the school; by the time I left Manila when I was eighteen I could beat him, too. My parents had died in a plane crash and left me enough money to support myself while I got a degree."

Bobbi was visibly agitated now. "I came back to the States and applied for early entrance to any university would take me--University of Georgia was willing to give me that _and_ full credit for advance courses I'd done at the school. So fast forward five years and I'm a freshly minted multiple PHD with no idea what I'm going to do with my life. I took a year teaching position--"

"Ha!" Bruce burst out, then shook his head. "I swear, you might be the only person I know _less_ suited to teaching than me."

Bobbi smiled wanly. "Yeah, it was hell. Which might be why I fell for Paul." She reached out to Hawkeye for the first time, just holding his hand for a moment. "I met another professor named Paul Allen. Older, sauve, good-looking. Attentive and mature in the way college guys just weren't. First man I'd ever known who seemed more interested in my brain than my boobs."

"Your brain's more attractive and that's saying _a lot_ ," Hawkeye said.

"I wasn't thinking with it though. We'd been quietly dating for about six months when his contract expired and he told me he was going to Florida to work on a top secret government project...and asked me to come with him. As his wife as well as his lab partner. I was young and dumb as a fucking post apparently because I said yes." She looked over at Tony. "If you ever invent a time machine, go back and shoot me in the head, okay? It would be a positive mercy."

"Anyway," she continued. "He went off to the Everglades and I stayed for another few months to finish my own contract. He wanted me just to quit but I had some semblance of honor and I wasn't going to run out on my students before exams. Then one night I came back to my apartment and there was a man with an eye patch sitting in my living room." She coughed and smiled behind her hand. "After Phil and Jimmy Woo pulled me _off_ him, he introduced himself."

She sighed again, her face going very cold. "The Everglades project was SHIELD's as it turned out and Paul was in way over his head. Fury showed me proof that Paul was selling secrets to the highest bidder and that he'd gotten himself into a bad jam--he'd double-crossed what turned out to be proto-A.I.M. by offering them something that he then turned around and sold to the Russian mob. He needed a scapegoat fast."

"He picked you," Thor rumbled, looking sick and distraught. "To profess love for a woman and then do such a thing is so devoid of honor it taints every action a man can take."

"Yeah, I thought I was in love with the guy and he was running around on me politically, morally, ethically--maybe he reminded me of my dad?--scientifically...and sexually, he was sleeping with anything in the area that had a vagina including possibly some raccoons."

"Can I kill him? Please? Will you tell me where he is now, for once?" Clint sounded like he wanted to cry. 

"Getting to that bit, sport, hang on. Once I was satisfied Fury was telling me the truth I basically started to book a ticket to Miami so I could go beat his head in myself--"

"That's when Fury recruited you." Steve said, flatly. "Never one to miss an opportunity, is he?" He'd noticed she wasn't stuttering. This was something from her past that didn't scare her. It made her angry and she was cold-angry, like him, like Nat.

"He asked me to go along with the original plan. Move to Florida. Live with Paul like his adoring fiancé. Work on the project. Gather intell and figure out exactly what part of what experiment he was trying to auction off; see to it that he never managed to deliver the product. Promised me the fucker would do life for treason. I told him I drew the line at marrying the piece of shit. He was okay with that. I never knew I was ruthless until then; never knew I was so hard."

"Strong, I would call it. The fire tempers or you shatter, in the end," Natasha mused.

"I have a strong stomach sure. Kept me from throwing up whenever Paul touched me after that. Three awful months. I managed not to have to sleep with him the whole time, busy with the lab work--which was really fascinating, never seen anything like it until then--icky chick stuff, runs into the city for supplies. He was very patient with me...because he was sleeping with one of the other scientists, Ellen Brandt, who was married to the fourth guy on the team, Ted Sallis. I swear with all the illicit boinking going on it made sense the two of them never seemed to get anything done." 

She sat down again, on Tony's stool. The rest of them were still standing--Clint looked like a mannequin he was trying so hard not to explode--or leaning on tables and walls. 

"It all came to a head in one night. I got fed up with the time table and broke into Paul's personal computer. Figured out that not only had he pissed off A.I.M badly enough they were sending a team of mercenaries--pre-Extremis but still dangerous--to kill him and take the goods he'd promised but that the whole project was a blind front for the most recent attempt to re-create the Super Soldier serum. Which is why Paul had zeroed in on me as his target--I'd written one of my thesis on you, Steve, on the genetic component of the process, with the limited public data available after the official secrets act expired. I told Ted what was going on--he was the only other person in the whole place not implicated in the treason. We wiped all the data from the computers, grabbed the back ups and all the samples and ran." She shook her head. "And that was just about exactly when guys with machine guns and flamethrowers attacked the complex. Last contact I'd had with SHIELD Ops they'd said they weren't going to be there for days, minimum."

She placed her hands on the table in front of her, bowing her head. "We ran straight into Paul and Ellen, coming to do the same thing we were doing: grab the samples and book it. Paul shot me and he was thankfully as bad at that as he was at everything else so I had time to kick the crap out of him, even with a flesh wound. Left the two of them there. But Ted and I were trapped, I was bleeding and crying; not as tough as I thought I was. Ted--he was a good man as well as a great scientist--he left me the data, took the samples, made a big show of having them, grabbed a car and took off. They chased him and I got away."

She stopped, her eyes liquid with old pain. 

"What happened to him?" Bruce said gently.

"He...they shot up his car and it crashed. Last I saw of him he was covered in chemicals and burning fuel, screaming, staggering into the swamp. And they were still chasing him. I made it to the safe house Fury had set up for me and just collapsed, feverish and almost comatose for days. When I woke up, I found I could turn off my emotions like a light switch, go all quiet inside. Even Fury telling me Paul was in jail and Ellen was dead didn't seem to mean anything. I told Fury I wanted in, permanently. I didn't want anyone else to get fucked by bad intell like that or get their hands on that data that I'd seen. I did my basic training, got bumped to the advanced class after two weeks, was _teaching_ the combatives course by week six--still a disaster--then Fury just gave me a badge, said I was Agent 19, code named Mockingbird and set me loose on Special Ops. In my spare time, I started to gather everything I could on the Super Solider Serum. Every rumor, every data file, every scrap of evidence. By the time they actually thawed you out, Cap, I was the leading expert on it by a mile. It made sense that they'd approach me to lead the final push to get _all_ the data."

She'd compressed over a decade of missions--espionage, assassinations, deep-cover work--into a few flippant sentences. Clint could remember seeing references to Agent 19 over the years, to her cleared op ratio (higher than his), seen her name on the intell gathered for his missions, heard about her uncanny ability to walk into any situation and become the person SHIELD needed her to be. He'd learned--all of Special Ops had learned--that any briefing she generated was the most trustworthy, the most complete. Deep, wide-ranging and clever.

"I was so damn close to you for so long. _Fuck_ Fury for keeping us apart," he managed to keep his voice level but from the look Natasha gave him he was not doing the best job. 

Bobbi smiled at him sadly. "I was a different person when I started, Clint. Still wounded and wary. I don't know if I could have handled you...how I feel about you. I thought love meant being betrayed." She shook herself like a dog and gestured at the screen. "I was the expert but not even Fury realized what I felt about the project. I'd started withholding crucial data about eight months into the mission. What I sent back to the mainframes was complete enough to look legit but missing enough details to prevent anyone from being able to use it. Then came HYDRA and I got shot in the back and...well. Now we're here."

"You sure get shot a lot," Tony said. Bruce nodded enthusiastically. 

She snorted. "I get stabbed and punched a lot too. Occupational hazard." She stood up, retrieved the camera and threw it to Hawkeye. "Clint, take my picture. Make sure it's just my head and shoulders in the frame, please."

He complied and handed the camera back to her when she extended her hand. 

"That camera is broken," Natasha said softly.

"Actually, it's working perfectly." Bobbi placed the camera lens down on the table top and stepped back. There was a fizz-pop and the battery case popped open of its own volition.

"That is a rather high energy explosive you have just exposed, Mrs Barton," JARVIS' calm voice said into the silence.

Bobbi smiled absently. "I had to be sure if anyone tried to open this thing without my complicity it would obliterate the data chip. And I find it helpful if things can go boom when no one expects them too. It only opens safely if you hit the shutter with my face in the frame." She reached down and stripped out a wad of pale putty, pulling away an ignition assembly on the back. "I took this off a HYDRA explosives expert last year, it's not in any data base I've found. You should look at it, Stark." Tony took the lump with barely restrained eagerness and immediately jammed it in one of his scanners. 

Gingerly, Bobbi extracted a data drive and tossed it in her hand a few times. Her strong-boned face was remote, all but expressionless save for some tension around her eyes. "This is the culmination of years of my life. All the pain and suffering, all the lies and compromises. I gave over my whole life, remade myself into something hard and cold and capable of nearly anything. I gathered this to prevent my enemy from having it, all in the name of my enemy unknown. I killed for this; I nearly died for it. This is the key to making an army of men and women who can fight like Captain America. Imagine what you could do with that kind of army."

The room was very still. The Avengers were hardly breathing. 

"Imagine," she whispered, "imagine how peaceful the world could be, under the heel of that army." She looked up and met Hawkeye's eyes, wide with fear in his face gone pale. 

Everyone was suddenly aware she was the only person in the room with her weapons. Thor rolled his shoulders, his hand coming up into 'I'm about to summon Mjolnir' position. 

Clint's lips parted and without sound he mouthed _I trust you_.

"Imagine the horror of it," she smiled as she said it and threw the drive to Steve. "It's a hero's decision, Captain. So it's hardly mine, is it?" 

Her smile went bitter and angry and sad all at once and she turned to stalk from the room. Hawkeye reached out and laid his hand against her chest, not holding her, just pausing her headlong flight. They looked at each other in silence for a long time, relief and love in his eyes, pain and bad memories in hers. Then he smiled and touched her face with one big strong hand, bringing the tear he brushed away to his lips.

She laid the back of her own hand against his jaw. "Not now...not tonight. I'm still...I want to be...not around men, right now. I don't want to lay your face over these memories. You made me forget them for the first time but--I'm raw, like I've been skinned. Last night, now this. I'm a little broken, Hawky." Her voice was still bitter but pleading at the same time.

"Don't be alone, little bird, please," Hawkeye was also pleading, gently.

"Da." Natasha said briskly. "I have the good vodka you can't bring into the country...legally. We will be on my floor, don't wait up." Black Widow walked past the Bartons, gesturing at Bobbi who followed with a grateful air.

The men looked at each other in silence. 

"Told you she had demons," Tony eventually managed, trying for and failing to reach cheerful.

"More than you know," Steve remarked absently. The small drive in his hand felt like it weighed a ton.

"What?" Clint barked, rounding on him. "What'd you mean by that?"

"I...uh..." Too late, Steve realized he had just handed Clint an outlet for his emotions _and_ outted himself as an eavesdropper. He winced and bit the bullet. "I was out on the deck last night...." 

He expected Clint to be angry. He was not expecting him to go white and look...hurt. Betrayed actually. 

"You were listening? How much did you hear?"

"All of it." Steve braced himself to get punched in the face again. 

Clint just stared at him. "Why?" He said simply, sounding like a child asking his father why he was being punished.

"By the time I figured out what you were talking about, I thought interrupting it was worse than being a total, complete, utter heel."

"Nice Cap. Way to be a hero." Clint snapped. He ran a hand over his face and turned away. Steve was certain he could see tears before he was fully faced away. His voice was even though. "You're probably right about that and I'm not sorry you didn't get in our faces but...I better not hear you giving her shit about any fucking thing short of trying to destroy the world for a good long time. Actually, you can lay off me too."

"What are you talking about?"

"I overheard a really really private conversation between Hawkeye and Mockingbird last night. Really private. I should have jumped off the roof rather than listen to it private."

"You? Boy scout?" Tony sounded shocked.

"Aw, Steve," Bruce admonished, "That's not good."

"No, Bruce, I thought it was the height of intelligence and honor. That's why I look like I could roast marshmallows with my face and I'm trying to figure out a way to tell Bobbi without her actually trying to murder me in my sleep."

"I think perhaps you should look to her husband for that right," Thor said quietly.

"I'm not that mad at him. It sucks he did it but...I'm...well, it's stuff someone other than me outta know. Sometime I guess you'll all know but for now, you just keep your trap shut. I'll tell her...later. When she's not likely to run screaming into the night."

"Clint, I'm sorry I damaged your trust in me," Steve said humbly.

"Just remember she's doing better on that front this week than you, okay?"

"I will." Steve looked down at his palm again. 

"Captain, what are you going to do with that?" Thor gestured broadly. 

"She's right about the kind of army someone...you...us...could build with that stuff," Tony said. "Right about all of it." He shook his head. "I don't even want to touch it."

Steve Rogers looked at his past sitting in his hand, thought about the future of the world and nodded, thoughtfully. "Maybe no one should have touched it in the first place. I was thinking we should...kill it with fire."

"Pop culture reference from you? You feeling okay Cap?" Tony quipped, regaining his composure. 

"No. I'm really not...I'm so sorry Clint. I should have..."

"Eh, whatever. Stop apologizing, it makes me want to crack you one. It's not something you talk about over beer."

"Don't," Steve's voice was tense and angry. "Don't make light of it like that."

Hawkeye stared at him, his eyes very cold. "I'm not, Cap. It's not light at all. But I get down on my knees and start screaming in rage, you'll all think I've gone crazy. 'scuse me, I'm going to the range. No one fucking bug me."


	9. Vodka and The Morning After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bobbi is an emotional drunk.
> 
> Natasha is a kind friend.
> 
> Clint is a good man.
> 
> Tony and Steve can work together very well when they try.

"Hawkeye."

"Yeah, Nat, what?" Hawkeye broke out of his shooting fugue state reluctantly. When he was at the range, he didn't have to think about Super Soldiers or his own past or the woman he was desperately in love with being brutalized. Just draw-shoot-retrieve-wipe away the blood. The clock on the wall said 3 AM. He'd been here 8 hours. 

"Stopping turning your fingertips into ground beef and come get your wife, she's down and out." Natasha's voice was distinctly slurred, which Clint had barely ever heard. The Black Widow's stomach for vodka was legendary; she could drink everyone but Thor and Steve under any table you might mention.

"How's--"

"Okay. She's an emotional drunk, as it turns out. Went from angry to 'I love you, man' to curled up around a pillow weeping in about three hours. Now she's drooling on my couch. Be gentle with her, okay? She's got hurt that goes as deep as any of ours."

"I'm gentle when she needs me to be," he joked reflexively, then stowed his equipment and made his way to the Black Widow's floor of the Tower.

Bobbi looked like a hot mess, her face swollen and red, her hair tangled and flecked with drool as she snored lightly on Natasha's black leather couch. He smiled at her fondly, then focussed on the number of bottles on the end table. 

"Holy shit, did you cut it with anything? And are you trying to kill my wife if not?" 

"There was some orange juice around here. At some point," Natasha sounded vague and owlish. Clint looked at her sharply. She was wavering just a little. 

"There's more bottles somewhere, aren't there?" 

"Yes, Clinton," she said very precisely. "There are...more. Some. More. I think. I cannot actually count those ones."

He made a skeptical noise.

"I fed her smoked salmon and rye bread and cream cheese, as well. I am not a barbarian."

On the couch, Bobbi snorted, coughed and woke up abruptly. She opened her blood shot eyes and blinked up at him. "'ello sport. You're...looming. And you have a hard on. I can see the outline pretty clearly," she said matter of factly. 

He started to laugh, rubbing the back of his neck. "I always have a hard on around beautiful women, especially the ones I'm married too." 

She snorted again. "'mmm nah beautiful. Nat's bootiful. I'm just...meh. I'm meh."

"She's been saying things like that all night. You're not being nice enough to her if she thinks that," Natasha scolded him drunk-fiercely.

"I tell her she's the most beautiful thing in the world every damn day Nat. I don't think I can fix her personality disorder in less than a week of marriage."

"I do not have a personality disorder, I'm a realist. Empirically speaking, around here I am very far from beautiful. You are beautiful, Steve is beautiful, Natasha's the beautifulest and I would totally do her if girls weren't icky," Bobbi declared with great hauteur, enunciating crisply. She rose to her full height and gestured to her left. "I am going to go throw up now." Walking slowly and steadily, she entered the powder room still on her feet. Seconds later, the sound of retching was loud.

Hawkeye covered his face in his hands. "Oh, gods, she's even like that when she'd drunk. Never marry an incredibly smart women, Nat."

"Wouldn't. She's right, girls are icky." She paused. "You know about the stutter? You know why it happens?" He nodded. Natasha patted him on shoulder, affectionately, then advanced into the bathroom and could be heard commiserating with Bobbi for a considerable length of time, between heaves. That gave Hawkeye time to set up a few things in the Nest, via JARVIS.

Bobbi staggered out of the bathroom in good time, smelling like vomit and orange juice and looking like death warmed over. Clint walked over to support her and she recoiled hard enough to stagger Natasha as she exited behind the blond. "Don' touch me. I'm super gross and smelly and gross."

"Oh, I'll manage worse than clean vodka barf one of these days and guess who'll be helping me around?" Clint grabbed her under her arm. "Come my beauty, my treasure, my little bird. JARVIS has drawn you a hot bath, I will wash your hair and force you to drink water until you slosh and then we will retire to a nice warm bed and cuddle. I will wear underwear. No hanky-panky, as promised."

Bobbi blinked at him. "You still have an erection." She sounded worried.

"I have nice hand lotion here," offered Natasha helpfully.

Clint threw her an exasperated look over his shoulder. "I'll manage, I'm not an animal."

"You're a mammal!" Bobbi trilled brightly, then gulped a little. 

They made it to the Nest before she barfed again, this time in the master bathroom sink. While she was moaning and resting her head on the marble counter, Hawkeye assembled a strike kit of bottled water, a bottle of scented shampoo recommended by JARVIS and a loofah mitt. He got Bobbi's clothes off (straight into the laundry chute) and half of the first water bottle in her before coaxing her into the warm, steamy, rose-and-lemon-oiled giant jetted bath. She settled into the water like a baby seal and then just sank to the bottom of the tub, streaming bubbles. Hawkeye pulled off his shirt, reached into the water and grabbed her arm, hauling her back to the surface.

"Try not to drown on me, little bird."

"I like this bathtub," she sighed contentedly. 

"You've mentioned that." Hawkeye handed her a water bottle. "Drink. I fear the idea of you with a hang over, drink."

She finished the water bottle and a second one while he lathered up her hair and upper body, making terrifying sexual noises as he stroked his hands over her scalp and chest. He had to stop and tap her on the nose. "Quit it."

"Youuurrrrr hannnnds though. You have the best hands."

"You've also mentioned that, hold your breath, dunking." He shoved her under the water and rippled the water to clear the shampoo out of the strands. She spit water at him playfully when she came up.

"On your feet little bird." Using the wand attached to the tap, he rinsed the last of the soap off her, watching the water intently so he didn't have to look at the way the skin on her full breasts glistened with the bath oils. She giggled and squirmed and tried to kiss his pecs. He'd learned fast she loved his chest the way some men love high heels.

"Quit that, too, not fair since I promised no touchy tonight."

She squinted at him. "'m growed up. I can change my mind about that." She put her hands on her hips, directing his attention to the trail of golden hair from her belly-button to the neatly trimmed top of her bush. He winced and looked away, then back at her face. 

"Little bird, you're angry and upset still. You're scared and down on yourself--by the way, don't say stupid shit like 'I'm just meh' around me ever again, okay?--and just because you're a horny drunk doesn't mean I'm going to break a promise to you. I think you need to drink more water, and get into bed and I will hold you and when you're sober again you can jump my bones whenever you want."

She drew back from him, her face confused and hurt. "You don't want me?"

"You are such an asshole." He grabbed her hand and held it to his crotch. His cock was rock hard against the fabric of his jeans. "I've wanted you 24/7 since the minute we met. I'm just not going to take advantage of a drunk woman even if she's my wife, okay? No one ever takes advantage of you again."

She stared at him in alcoholic confusion. "There are men like you in the world? I never thought..."

"Men? Little bird, there ain't but one o'me."

She laughed, brightly, then sighed and slide down his body slowly to puddle on the floor of the now draining bath. When he picked her up, she was already snoring drunkenly again. He kissed her closed eyes, dried her off and hauled her into the bedroom. Then he ducked back into the bathroom and took care of himself: focusing on her looking like the Venus rising from the sea he was over the edge pretty darn quick.

In the king sized bed, Bobbi was thrashing around a little, muttering. He grinned and pulled on a fresh pair of boxers--then froze when she spoke his name.

"Clint," she whimpered, her hands patting out like she was searching for him under the blankets. "Clinnnnntttttt." Her voice was growing more distressed by the second. He joined her under the sheets and spooned up against her, kissing the back of her neck; she settled like a calmed horse. He fell asleep smiling, his fingers still throbbing from the beating he'd given them earlier. Funny, he'd never even noticed the pain until now. 

Clint woke up with a large dog sitting on his stomach. He opened his eyes. Nope, the warm solid weight parked on his hips was Bobbi. She looked disgustingly chipper. When his eyes opened, she smiled at him as sweetly as any soul-eating demon could smile.

"Thank you for the water last night. And the wonderful bath. We will have to do that when you aren't swore to celibacy." Then she moved down his body in one swift motion and the top of his head exploded. If the blow job she'd given him in the kitchen had been incredible, the one she gave him that morning in bed was almost perfect. She strung him along on the edge for a nice long time, but not so long he felt like he was being tortured. She used a bunch of different techniques but in the end settled into a gorgeous smooth rhythm with her mouth and one hand working in tandem, her other hand braced against his hip. She still smelled of the bath oil and shampoo, all citrus and flowers and sex.

When he came, he grayed out for a long time, just let the pleasure and transcendence blot out his consciousness till it was over. He came back to the sight of his naked wife pulling up a bed tray between them, loaded with scrambled eggs, bacon, juice and two huge mugs. His was black coffee, hers smelt like tea, nearly as black.

"Oh, can you get stupid drunk every night? Please?" He sat up and jammed some bacon into his mouth, reveling in the maple-salty flesh.

She snickered and tapped the New York Times up on her tablet, then started in on her side of the eggs. "I'd say you deserved it but I kinda think the way you were acting last night wasn't anything special, was it?" She drank her tea in big gulps, un-selfconciously, then switched to orange juice. 

"Why would it be?" he asked around his own mug.

"You have no idea sport. Most guys woulda had me on the floor of the bathroom in a heartbeat."

"Not me. Not Steve, or Tony or anyone here. Not any decent guy. And not anyone who actually loved you. I, actually, love you."

"I...I'm starting to believe that. I know it but...i'm starting to believe." She looked at him wonderingly, a drop of orange juice on her bottom lip. He brushed it off with his thumb. She was still mottled in bruises from her fight with Steve but they were fading fast. 

"Believe it. Know it. Accept it. I love you little bird and I might do stupid things that hurt you but not because I want to. I'm just a dumb ass."

"You're not." She punched him firmly in the upper arm. "Thought we'd established that: I don't get to say I'm 'meh' you don't get to call yourself stupid. Deal?"

"Ow. That really hurt," he said in a shocked voice.

"I can hit like the boys, sport. Thought we'd established that, too."

"Yeah, I get distracted from facts by nipples, sorry. It's my secret weakness."

"By the way, what the _fuck_ did you do to your fingertips?"

He looked down at his hands, raw in places, swollen and red at the nails. "Eight hours at the range. I lose track."

She looked stricken. "I'm so s-s-s-sorry."

He grabbed her and kissed her deeply, feeling her lips jump against his mouth. She tasted like orange pekoe and honey. "Hey, I do this about once a week; before the team I'd go out and get into bar fights when I was that mad. It's cool, it's cool."

"Hmmph. I do that too."

"Range time? Or bar fights?"

She ducked her head. "Bar fights, seriously, I wrecked a harbor joint in Istanbul the last time I was really angry, when I was on the run. The only reason I didn't get arrested was the cops wouldn't believe anyone who pointed at the blue-eyed, blond western woman as I was walking away."

"Oh, man, everything I find out about you I love you a little more," he laughed and applied himself to the eggs. She laughed as well and they settled into a comfortable quiet breakfast, reading and eating and kissing gently. 

"Mr and Mrs Barton, Captain Rogers is at your door, requesting to speak with you," Jarvis intoned as they were finishing up.

"Let him in, Jarvis, thanks," Bobbi said quickly. Clint looked at her, still naked, then at himself, equally naked. She smiled that devil's smile again and called out: "In the bedroom Steve."

Steve walked in the bedroom door, spun on his heel and stalked back out. From the living room, they both heard him say very clearly "I hate you both more than HYDRA."

The Bartons tumbled out of the bedroom together, both wearing shorts and T-shirts a short time later. Bobbi was holding the carafe of orange juice and an unused glass. "Juice, Steve? You need the calories." He took the proffered drink with a glare and ignored the way Hawkeye was laughing at him.

"Thank you, Mockingbird. I didn't actually come here to play a supporting role in your personal stag movie, you know."

"The lighting in here is great -- strictly erotica. Or hard-core porn," said Clint.

Steve pinched the bridge of his nose. "Please shut up."

Bobbi elbowed Clint in the ribs. "To what do we owe the pleasure, Captain?"

"I wanted to show you something, Bobbi."

"I'm a married woman now, Steve," she returned with a straight face. Clint elbowed her in the ribs. 

Steve went past it like she hadn't spoken. He pulled out his own Starktab--he'd taken to modern tech like a duck to water--and swiped up a video file. It started to play. Inside the lab, Bruce and Tony were fussing around with a small magnetic containment unit, under a flame hood. Steve came into frame, holding the USB drive in his hand. He dropped it into the containment unit, doused it with some clear liquid from a bottle Tony handed him and stepped back. There was a pause, then the air above the drive shimmered and burst into white hot flames with a soft implosive noise. The camera zoomed in on the metal and plastic melting and pooling.

"Ah," Bobbi said softly. "That was well done, Steve. Thank you."

"I do have an important question--what is that file Fury sent, exactly?"

"Hmm. From the quick look I got--it seems like someone out there still had the original data from the Everglades base. It was called Project Gladiator and it was a closed system. The data files I pulled out physically should have been the only ones in existence. That data had been modified and changed so someone has been working with it since then. They didn't make it far but they're trying. Which is a little scary but without the physical samples from that base--all destroyed--or one of the original team I don't think they'll get far. It was very flawed, from the base codes up."

"Can you look into for us? Figure out where it came from?"

"Huh? Yeah, sure. There are a limited number of people who'd even be able to see what it was. I can certainly check up on them."

"Like your ex-fiancé?" Clint said in a pointed voice. "You still haven't told me _which_ prison he's in."

"You'll go shoot him."

"I never said that."

"You said it like fifteen times."

"Okay, I said it maybe eight times."

"Fury never told me. They changed his name and socked him away somewhere so deep I could never track him down. Or I'd have bashed his face in long ago."

Steve held up his hand. "Enough, you two and your murderous tendencies. Anything you can do with that info, I'd be grateful. I want to nip in the bud any attempts to bring back that program."

"Agreed," Bobbi said.

"Bruce pointed something out to me, though," Steve said in a strained voice, after looking at her quietly a moment. "That information..it's still in your head, isn't it?"

Bobbi looked uncomfortable and walked over to the floor-length windows, staring out over the city. "Yeah. Mostly. I mean, I'm not smart enough to remember it all but...I could work it out. I know--" her hands came up, make shapes in the air "--the form, the outline. I could, with trials, re-create it." She spun around abruptly. "I won't though. I've been trying to forget it."

"But if you had sufficient motivation...say, someone was torturing Hawkeye...?" Steve trailed off, looking over at the archer, whose face was a study in controlled irritation.

"I...I don't know Steve. I'd like to think I'm smart enough, strong enough, to figure out something rather than give in to anything like that but...if I was hopeless... I don't think I would but...I don't know."

Steve straightened, nodding firmly, his face clearing. "Good. That's what I wanted to hear. I wouldn't have believed anything else." 

Hawkeye walked over to his wife and pulled her into his arms, rocking back and forth a little. "It's just extra incentive to keep you safe. This apartment is pretty safe, maybe I should just stick a shock collar on you so you can't leave. You'd never even need to wear clothes."

Bobbi smiled at him fondly...and then stomped on his instep with her heel. He managed to hold onto her while he was yelping and hopping in pain, which lead to a jiu-jitsu take down, which lead to them wrestling on the living room floor. At some point, Bobbi looked up to see that Steve had vacated the apartment...so she let Hawkeye "pin" her. 

He looked down on her with a puppy-dog expression: open, joyful, yearning. 

Bobbi closed her eyes a moment, looking inside herself. She heard Clint sigh and start to push off her. Reflexively, she wrapped her legs around his hips and pulled him back down. Unlike even a day or two ago, the motion didn't make her feel anxious or sick.

Oh, what wonder to _want_ again.

Clint was holding his breath. She smiled, eyes still closed. 

"Who am I?" she whispered to him, feeling the heat of the sun on her face.

"Bobbi Barton," he whispered back, his hips moving a little, as though he couldn't help himself. 

"Who am I?" 

"Mockingbird."

"Who am I?"

"My little bird."

"Prove it," she hissed, opening her eyes and staring at him, fiercely. 

He kissed her, rolling them both over as he did so that she was lying on his chest. He sat up, pulling her across his body into his arms and then just getting up like it was nothing, like she wasn't 170 lbs of muscle, like she was some elf maiden in a fairy tale.

Bobbi gasped into his mouth, the rush of love and desire making her head spin. No one, no one had ever made her feel like she was delicate and feminine and fragile without diminishing her as a fighter. As Clint carried her back into the bedroom she realized he had never treated her as an equal. He'd always treated her as though he _never considered she wasn't his equal_.

"Leave the curtains open," she murmured as he set her down in the middle of the still messy bed. "I want to see all of you."

Hawkeye nodded, his face grave and serious but his eyes dancing. He slide his clothes off and helped her with hers, over eager and awkward like a teenager, like it was their first time together. 

He made love to her in the sunshine, till the light had moved from one side of the window to the other, as though she was made of lace and spun glass. She thought of nothing but him, memorizing the smell of his hair, the taste of his sweat, the sound of his breathing as she laid her head on his chest. She fancied their hearts started to beat in unison, faster and slower as the moment called for. 

She fell asleep in his arms, warm and safe as a newborn puppy and she felt reborn when she awoke. Alone--but she'd known that, there was a team meeting that night and even Clint wouldn't miss one without good reason. 

She showered and made more tea, then flipped open the obscenely powerful laptop Stark had dropped off for her as a "wedding present" when he'd delivered her newly reforged batons a few days ago. 

Now _those_ were things of beauty. She'd already put a few dents in the walls of the Nest testing their rebounds (basically perfect). She needed to get them out down in the gym, preferably with Clint and Natasha and maybe Steve since he was warming up to her, so she could put them through their paces. It was nice to be able to take pleasure in the tools of her trade again.

Bobbi found herself staring at them longingly now. She felt loose and relaxed, ready to fight on a moments whim. One of the reasons she'd never gone for an academic career--after getting her degrees--was that she found lab work tedious. 

Firmly, she forced herself to study the data that Fury had sent, making notes and comparing it all to what she remembered from her collated data. It was pretty clear within a few pages that someone out there was trying to revive Project Gladiator...and since Ted Sallis and Ellen Brandt were dead, that left her, Paul and...

A few minutes searching on the web yielded a phone number in the Biotech Department at Georgia Tech. Bobbi used Clint's phone to call, getting a voicemail: "You've reached the offices of Dr Wilma Calvin..."

*****

Tony slouched last into the meeting distinctly not dressed for battle in a tshirt and loose pants, barefoot. He'd stopped wearing shoes to meetings months ago, mostly because he knew it made Steve _insane_. 

The rest of them were talking about Steve and Bobbi's fight again.

"He was going easy on her," offered Natasha in reply to something Bruce had just said. She was in her full regalia, all black and red and faintly menacing. 

" _Thank_ you," Steve muttered. "Nice to know someone saw that."

"To be fair, she did still kick your ass," she continued. 

"Et tu, Widow?" Steve made an exaggerated "stabbed in the heart" motion. 

Clint snorted. "You guys haven't seen her with her batons yet, even. It's like fighting a hummingbird made of razor blades and smoke."

"Actually, I think it's about time you did tell us what happened to you two in New Jersey," Steve said.

"It's a really long story and I need her to tell it right."

"After the meeting then," Captain America said firmly and Clint nodded. 

They ran through their usual laundry list of items pretty quickly, covering everything from the current number of paparazzi hanging around the Tower (five to fifteen weather dependent) and the Avengers social media presence (Pepper and her assistants handled that) to on going threat assessment. The only thing really concerning anyone was the data file Bobbi was already working on--there was a general consensus that Steve had been right to give her that assignment. 

Steve had not really noticed how much his animosity towards Clint's wife had been affecting the rest of the team. He forgot sometimes how much they all looked to him as the emotional center of the group, the stable rock.

They were starting to devolve into the usual back and forth banter that ended every meeting. He reached over and tapped the table and even Stark shut up, staring at him. 

"I'm sorry, Clint, but I have to say this, like I had to say it to her this morning--and don't think I'm not going to get you both for that little incident," he tried to end on a joke, which fell flat in the face of Clint's afronted glare.

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Steve, what are you worried about?"

"That someone will take a shot at her and you'll drop what you're doing to find them and punch them in the face."

"There's a precedent for it, Clint," Bruce interjected calmly, with just a hint of 'stirring the pot' behind his eyes.

Tony grinned. Thor slapped one big hand on the table, barking a laugh.

Natasha was the one who answered. "I've never seen him jeopardize a mission for personal reasons and I _have_ seen him dealing with some pretty high stress stakes. Though maybe not as high stress as 'bad guys are torturing my wife'" She looked at Clint pointedly. 

"Sure," he muttered softly, his mouth in a set line, "Cause we were only sleeping together when they did it to you. Did I fuck that extraction up? I was hitting my targets even when I was wiping your blood out of my eyes."

Natasha smiled at him grimly. "Nor more then I did when I improvised those splints for all your fingers on a sinking boat in the Adriatic." Clint's powerful hands, spread out on the table, flinched and closed into fists. 

Steve looked even more uncomfortable. 

Tony tossed his head. "Yeah, yeah. You have history, we get it."

Nat and Clint had the grace to look a little shame-faced.

"It's not a problem. She'd _murder_ me if I tried to protect her in a fight," Clint said, his eyes glittering. "If I needed to protect her, she wouldn't be Mockingbird....and we'd never have met...and I'd never have married her. So it's not an issue."

"You're sure? Someone's got her down with a gun to her head and you're just going to shrug?" Steve's posture was tense. He looked like a man still expecting a fight.

He didn't get it. Instead, Clint laughed at him. 

"Cap...Steve...I'd react the same for her as for Nat...or Tony...or even you." His clear light eyes went very hard and very cold. "I'd put a fucking arrow in the guy's brain and move onto the next target."

Bruce cleared his throat. "It that unspoken risk we all took, isn't it? When we agreed to be a team, to live together, to fight together. We all suddenly had vulnerabilities we never had before. When it was just me and, and the other guy I had a lot less to worry about. But it was pretty damn lonely. I like this better. He likes it better."

"Agreed," Thor rumbled for the first time. "I have seen the Lady Barton train, and fight. I have no concerns she will prove a liability to us. And I have only a fraction of the knowledge of her skills and strengths that her husband has."

"Guys, I..." Clint jerked to a halt and laid his hands open on the table top. "I'm not dumb, all right? I'm not going to say I'm going to be the king of cool if something happened to her. I'm probably going to lose my mind. But I'll lose it after the important stuff. Back me up here, Nat.

The ex-Russian spy shrugged. "I don't need to. We all know it's true. But you need to be prepared if you're not as together about it as you think you're going to be."

"Yeah, okay. You're right." Clint nodded, thoughtfully.

"We have an answer to the question: 'How do we get Clint to act like a normal person during conversations?'" Bruce remarked to Tony.

"Have boobs and sleep with him? I can't do one and I'm not doing the other, no offense, he's a good-looking guy but it's not to my personal t--" 

Clint got him in the mouth with a ball of paper that had been a note pad sheet seconds earlier. As he choked and spat, Natasha started cleaning her fingernails with a knife and the 'science bros' subsided, having scored their points for the day.

Steve and Thor exchanged a 'these people are supposed to be adults' look.

There was a knock. They all turned to see Bobbi framed in the door. She did not look happy.

"Did I seriously just hear you assholes slut-shaming Nat?"

Black Widow answered. "No, no, they think it's funny that Clint and I can be friends despite having seen each other naked."

"That explains Stark's love life," Bobbi responded. The two women exchanged a look of pure female disgust.

Clint glanced at the other men, now looking embarrassed. "Apologizing works in these situations," he said piously. 

They both mumbled "Sorry, Nat".

"Sorry to interrupt the _cough_ important meeting but I needed give you all an update," Bobbi said, advancing into the room to lay her hand on Clint's shoulder.

"What did you find?" Steve asked.

"There's someone I need to talk to, at Georgia Tech in Atlanta--my old advisor Dr. Wilma Calvin. She knew Ted Sallis and she consulted on Project Gladiator; she's a possible source for the data. But I know she won't talk to me unless it's in person and I'm alone."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I called her and she said so."

Steve looked around the table. "Are you comfortable going by yourself? Is that what this is about?"

"No Steve, I need a big strong man to come along and hold my hand."

"Give him a break, Bobbi," said Nat.

"Sorry. I'm fine going by myself...it's just...am I legally allowed to travel by plane? I entered the country under a false name and I actually don't know what my legal status is at the moment."

"You're married to me," Clint said firmly.

"Forever and ever but I might also still be a wanted fugitive."

Tony threw up a hand. "Oh, man, I'm an idiot. Hang on." He stood up and walked out of the room for a minute, then came back. "Pepper dropped these off yesterday and I totally forgot to give them to you."

He handed her a sheaf of papers and documents. Bobbi put them down on the table and spread them out. 

A New York State Driver's License, in the name of Bobbi Barton with her picture. An American Passport. A Social Insurance card; a copy of her birth certificate.

"Stark Legal checked--you were never charged with anything in the States. You were on a couple of watch lists--not anymore, since SHIELD went down, so that took care of itself. Everything else cleared up with money, Pepper Potts brand persuasion and dropping _his_ name to MI6 and Interpol." He gestured at Steve, who waved a little salute at her. "Make sure you start filing your tax returns again this year, though."

Her hands shaking, Bobbi sat down in Clint's lap abruptly. "Thank you. I...you gave me my life back." She started to cry, quietly, her face buried in Clint's chest.

Hawkeye rested his chin on her head, his eyes wet, looking from Tony to Steve. "Yeah. Thank you guys, I never even thought of that stuff."

"Teamwork," Tony crowed and leaned over the fist bump Captain America, who actually reciprocated with an indulgent smile. 

Bobbi sniffed and sat up, wiping her eyes. "Well, that clears up the problem then. I'll book a ticket to Atlanta in the morning and I should be back tomorrow night, okay?"

"I can go with if you like," Clint said.

"Well...actually...I'd like to get you a wedding present at the same time," she said. He smiled and kissed her nose.

Natasha made a delicate gagging noise.

They both gave her the finger.

"Uh, I overheard some of that--sorry--and I did want to ask: were you all talking about me like you wanted me on the team?" Bobbi asked, still a little shaky. She thankfully missed Steve's guilty jump on the word 'overheard'.

"Sure, you're living here, you're expected to pull your weight--what, you were just going to be a woman of leisure for the rest of your life?" Tony asked brightly.

"Yeah, watch soap operas and eat bon bons and greet Hawkeye at the door with his slippers and a martini," she shot back, her voice steadying.

"I like the sound of that, but change it to a beer," Hawkeye said brightly and managed to sound lecherous even then. His hand on her side drifted lower. 

She leaned into his chest again. "Stop being an asshole, Hawky, love you. No, I just figured I'd find something in the private sector. I heard Stark Industries was hiring."

Tony snorted. "Yeah, I'll hire you to work for me the day I want a hostile takeover to start."

"Darn. Foiled again."

Steve stretched and stood up. "We'll take it slow, Bobbi, but given that you were on the short list for the Avengers in the first place, I don't see why you can't, you know, audition."

"I'll work on my dance routine."

"We danced already once. I'd like to see you in action with the batons, too."

"Little bird, they want to hear the Crosstech story, you up to it tonight?" Clint said, standing up and setting her on her feet as he did.

"Hmm...yeah, sure. I can make some crude hand-puppets for visual aids."

"Show me on this puppet where the super villain brain-washed you," Natasha said, so quietly it didn't register at first.

They were all still laughing as they decamped to their quarters to change before dinner.


	10. Past and Present, Colliding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even very smart people make bad decisions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Looking over the work till now, I have noticed orange juice showing up a lot.
> 
> I don't even drink orange juice.
> 
> Hmmmmmmmm....

Bobbi felt a wave of nostalgia as she stepped out of the cab at the intersection of Fowler and Ferst on the northeast side of the Georgia Tech campus. Her alma mater was the University of Georgia to the east, in Athens, but she'd been to this campus a million times: for seminars, football games, social events. Atlanta was a vibrant and amazing city--she'd gotten addicted to the peach syrup you could buy in the touristy shops and markets; it made amazing twisted mint juleps. She'd have to have everyone over to the Nest and make a batch, have southern barbecue and watch movies. 

How funny to be able to plan for the future, for longer than a few days or weeks in advance. How funny to think she might be living in the same place long enough to celebrate the change of the seasons, to see snow again, to decorate for Christmas and go grocery shopping and kiss Clint through champagne bubbles at New Years and make a life that wasn't all about death and pain and fear.

Georgia Tech had such a beautiful campus she'd asked the cabbie to let her out early (good trade craft, too, second nature/reflex by now) and strolled through the buildings. The frat houses were to her left and behind her, Chandler Stadium to her right. At the end of summer, school not in session yet, the campus was quiet. A warm wind brought the smell of green growing things, the rich wet scent of the south. She was wearing a powder blue tshirt and jeans, carrying the obscenely expensive black leather military style jacket Natasha had essentially forced her at gun-point to buy.

She paused to grin at the sign in front of one building. Nanotech? She could imagine Stark would be a rock star in there. Turning north, she made a bee line for the Petit Biotechnology Building. Calvin's office was on the top floor. 

"They sure did love red brick and green glass when they built this place," she muttered as she pushed her way into the lobby. A weedy young man with short dark hair lunged at the door and she nearly hit him in the throat, pulling it at the last second. He was just trying to be suave by holding it open for her, his gaze roving from her toes to her pony-tail and then fixating on her cotton covered cleavage. She sighed and placed her hand in front of her breasts, pointing up. When he sheepishly met her eyes she nodded. "Not polite, sport. Married. And I would pulverize you, delicate little thing that you are. Strike three. Thanks for holding the door though."

She spoke quietly, wanting to make a point without humiliating him. He stared at her, embarrassed and flushed. She smiled and took the internal stairs to the top floor two at a time. She hated unsecured elevators. 

Dr Wilma Calvin's office was right at the south east corner of the top floor, with a window looking over an open quad towards the Environmental Science Building. It was small and comfortable, mostly books, a compact desk and two battered chairs--the office of someone who did less teaching than lab work. 

Bobbi knocked on the door frame, leaning into the room with a grin on her face. "What's up, doc?" she asked when the room's occupant looked up at her. 

Dr Calvin was a small, neat African-AMerican woman with a flat-top of white hair, her face wrinkled but made youthful with a broad smile. She jumped to her feet, beaming, embraced Bobbi, pulling her into the visitors chair. "Barbara! Back from the dead and as beautiful as ever! A moment, let my put the phone on voice mail so we aren't disturbed." She fiddled with her cell phone a moment then slipped it into her pocket. When she looked back at Bobbi, her eyes were sad.

"Yeah, sorry about that. My life got really weird after uni," Bobbi said sheepishly. "It wasn't the safest for anyone from before if I was in contact with them. I missed talking to you though, over the years." Dr Calvin had been Bobbi's professor and mentor and eventually almost surrogate mother during her school days, forcing her to balance her work with the semblance of a social life, chiding her for being a little too intense, a little too serious. Teaching her how to survive in the States, which was a different world than a boarding school in the Philippines. She'd disapproved of Paul Allen but not of the work Bobbi would be doing on Project Gladiator and she'd been listed on the project as an advisor. Other than Bobbi herself, Calvin was the last extant link to the old data.

She was studying Bobbi with narrowed eyes, examining every inch of her. Bobbi sat still, hands splayed on her knees, her face calm and composed. She knew Calvin was cataloguing the thin lines of scars visible on her forearms and upper chest, the purple bruises from her fight with Steve, the hands where nearly every finger joint had been popped out of alignment (direct result from decades of stick fighting), the sturdy frame layered with flat hard muscle. The lines of pain that had been ground into the corners of her eyes. The top of the right ear that was missing, sheered off in a thin straight line, barely visible under her hair. The faintly crinkled burn patches on either side of her neck, just behind her jaw.

The stillness under the skin, the efficient calculating gaze of a hunter.

"Not the ingénue you once knew?" she said softly when the examination was done.

"What have you been doing with yourself, child?" Calvin's hand clutched at her locket necklace, an old familiar reflex that made Bobbi smile.

"Saving lives on the good days."

"And the bad ones?"

"Very much the opposite," Bobbi said, keeping her voice bland and even. 

Dr Calvin nodded slowly. "You were never suited to academia. I still think you only got those degrees to prove to your parents you could."

Bobbi opened her hand to the air, catching the words and letting them fly free again. "They've been useful, over the years. Though sometimes they get me into as much trouble as the smart mouth and the belligerence."

"Yes. I'd wondered about all that since...since that horrible accident that killed Ted and Ellen," Dr Calvin said slowly, never looking away from Bobbi's face. "I was glad to get your note after, glad to know you were still alive but it was a tad...cryptic."

Bobbi tipped her head to the side. "I'm sorry about that. I know Ted was your student too. He was a good man and he shouldn't...it shouldn't have happened to him, what happened...which I can't really talk about even now."

"You can tell me but you'll have to kill me?" Dr Calvin asked lightly.

Bobbi's expression remained grave. "People always say that like it's a joke," she mused.

A rather chill silence spread through the air between them. Bobbi made no attempt to warm it up, simply looking around at the book shelves with interest.

"I worried about you, over the years. It appears I was right to do so," Dr. Calvin managed eventually. Bobbi left off studying the volumes nearest her and nodded.

"Yeah, worry would certainly be a valid and intelligent response to how I chose to live my life. I'm sorry about that; I hope it helps you to know that I relied on your good sense, as transmuted through my thick skull, more than once. Proof positive that I turned out to be good at my chosen profession would be that I'm still breathing. I have recently discovered that I may have managed to make myself into something rather unique without really trying." She stood up and stretched, then rubbed her bare arms to ward off the air conditioning and shrugged into her jacket, popping her wrists to set the sleeves. 

"That's an excessively leading statement, Barbara dear." Dr. Calvin blinked up at her in an exasperated fashion.

"It's Bobbi, Wilma. Please. I've hated being called Barbara since Florida." She smiled. "I'm not sure I can make too many claims but I will say that I recently married into a very interesting 'family'. The world's mightiest street gang you might say. Thankfully a righteous one." 

Dr Calvin sat up. "Married? To whom?"

"A good man, Wilma. A warrior and smart-ass and hero. Someone who can take care of himself; someone who lets me take care of him; someone who can take care of me. He's got interesting friends, we live in a really nice apartment in New York, the sex is a-maz-ing."

"Well, that's the important thing taken care of then," Dr. Calvin said firmly, her eyes bright. 

"My taste in men has certainly improved," Bobbi remarked carelessly, looking away from her old teacher and back to the books.

"Bobbi, the impression from your message was that you were coming to visit me with a purpose--to get your old research I thought?" Dr. Calvin said slowly, her voice trembling a little.

"Hmm? Oh yeah, that was certainly the impression I was intending to leave. I even told the team that's what I was doing," Bobbi's voice was absent and distant. "Has it been enough time for him to get here?" She flicked her gaze back to Dr. Calvin, now frozen in visible fear behind her desk.

"I don't...I don't know..."

"Wilma," Bobbi interrupted gently. "I'm very good at this; much better than you, for once. Much better than _him_ too. The bait was painfully obvious once I thought about it."

"Why did you come then?" Dr. Calvin whispered, sounding as though she couldn't breathe.

"Because I figured he had something bad in his pocket, to have coerced you like that and I'd like to take away his leverage. Who's he threatening?"

"Janie. My grand daughter."

"Percy has a daughter? Aw, that's great, give him my best." 

"Bobbi, he's become obsessed with you."

"Percy?" Bobbi asked with a grin. 

"Not Percy. Please don't joke about it...him. He's not rational when he talks about you." Dr. Calvin said faintly. 

"The last man who felt that way about me might be dead so that's unlucky for him, isn't it?" She touched one of the books, pulling it out and flipping it to a random page. "I know what he wants, Wilma. It's not what he thinks it is and this is all going to go spectacularly off the rails for him right quick but for now I'd rather he was paying attention to me and not you."

"I betrayed you, why would you want to help me?"

"Good people do bad things for good reasons, Wilma. And this isn't a betrayal, this is just the game. You play or you die." Bobbi snagged a pen off the desk and scrawled a name and phone number into the margin of the book, then handed it to Dr. Calvin. "He's expecting you to come out to the quadrangle with me, right?"

The other woman nodded.

"Well, don't. You go out the side and get off campus. Take that book with you, if they stop you it won't be obvious. Go home, drink some tea and then call the number. Sharon's with the CIA now but she can direct you towards someone in the FBI you can trust. Tell them the whole thing, drop my name freely. Tell them to check with Steve Rogers about me, if they need to."

"Steve Rogers? Captain America?" Dr. Calvin sat up straight, hope gleaming in her eyes suddenly.

"How the hell does he do that? I'm in another god damn state," Bobbi asked the ceiling in wonderment. "Just his name is enough?" She looked back at Dr. Calvin, who was eyeing her warily. "Sorry, Steve and I have had to work out a few...issues with each other."

Dr. Calvin was swiftly gathering up her things, tucking the book into her briefcase. "Bobbi, I hope you can forgive me for this. I would never have done it--"

"Nothing to forgive. Wilma, I've been _betrayed_. It's not like this. This is bullying taken to its least moral energy level. I can handle myself. You take care of your family. If this works out, I hope I can contact you again?" Bobbi asked, suddenly tentative.

Dr. Calvin paused and looked her straight in the eye. "It would be my honor to have you over for dinner. And this new man of yours. It's not..."

"Oh, gods, no it's not Steve. Urgh, no. Not not not Steve. One of us would be dead inside of a month, I was married to him." She found her battered hands being taken into a firm cool grip, her head pulled down so that the shorter woman could kiss her cheek.

"You seem very sure of yourself but please, be careful." Dr. Calvin dropped her hands and gathered the last of her belongings. "He...he's very dangerous, Bobbi."

"Not as dangerous as me, Wilma." It was a plain clear statement of fact, no bragging or posturing. Bobbi turned and left the office with a two-fingered salute. She sauntered down the stairs into the lobby, walking steadily but not rushing, taking the east door into the grassy space between buildings.

There were a few students sitting outside, reading, talking, one girl in a tank top and short shorts sunning herself. And dead in the centre of the space a tall man was standing, staring intently as her as she moved into the sunshine, turning her face upwards and smiling a little.

He was thin, long bony limbs that gave him the aspect of a predatory insect, a certain strange charisma. His skin was pale, with a sallow tint and his hair was very black. He was dressed in long pants and a polo shirt with sweat stains at the armpits. His mouth was full; his eyes were dark and wide-set over a patrician nose.

"Barbara," he breathed, joyful, when she was within earshot.

"Hi Paul," Bobbi greeted him cheerily, then snapped her right hand down hard. Her combat baton ejected from its holder, painstakingly grafted into the arm of her jacket by Stark himself and extended into her grip with a soft _whump_. She raised it into a striking position. "Goodbye, Paul."

Mockingbird moved in for the kill.

*****

Hawkeye was sitting at the common dining room table, a big round battered thing that even Thor had trouble denting, working on something with his Starktab and a laptop. Steve--who was being diligent about his caloric intake these days--looked over from the kitchen where he'd made a bowl of granola and bananas after his work out, trying to figure out what he was doing. 

Tony exited the elevator and poked Clint in the spine on his way past. Clint hit him in the back of the head with another paper ball without even looking up. 

"What'cha cluttering up my table for, Hawkeye? Can't do your...what the hell are you doing?" Tony walked back and craned his head over the archer's shoulder, reading the screen. "That's differential calculus."

"Is it? It's sniper stuff. I figured it was just geometry."

"Well, it's that too. Where'd you learn it?"

"Shooting people. I don't know the formulas, really. It's...brute force and experience."

Steve walked over, sitting down across from him. "I didn't realize being a marksman required homework."

"One of the reasons I stopped by Cross Industries in the first place was because I got asked by the Marines to teach a special course for the SEALS, now that you guys have made me all respectable and stuff. I wanted to see what the high quality mass produced bows were like these days; been using my custom one so long it's like picking up a totally different weapon. I'm just working through a few scenarios I want to present for it."

"You never mentioned that."

"Well, it was only about two weeks ago and I've been busy since then."

Tony chucked him on the top of the head. "Sure you have...sport."

"Don't call me that." Clint's voice, friendly before, went so flat and cold it was horrifying, like he'd ripped his face off to reveal a reptile underneath. Tony recoiled, staring. "No one else calls her little bird, no one else calls me sport. Got it?"

"It means that much to you?"

"Yeah. Okay?"

"Sure, yeah, Jeeeeeebus, you're fucking scary when you go into assassin mode."

"That's the idea," Clint agreed, looking back down at his screens, making a few notes on the tablet.

Tony looked over at Steve, who had an eyebrow raised, then went back to eating his cereal.

"Uh, sorry?"

Clint looked up at him and shook his head. "I know you think I'm over reacting but I don't...I've never...never had anything, ever, in my life, other than being Hawkeye that was just mine. Something that was just about making me happy."

"Except her," Steve offered, nodding. He'd felt a glimmer of that with Peggy, before it was all ripped away from him. 

"Except her, yeah. I'm a marksman, that's what I do. I'm an Avenger, that's what I am. Bobbi's already the reason I want to keep doing those things. To make her proud, to keep her safe. Whole world shifted when I met her, guys." His voice, sincere and serious, went a little hoarse and he looked down at the tabletop without seeing it. "I don't orbit the sun anymore with the rest of you. I orbit her."

"Yeah. Been there," Tony said, his own voice small, humble. "Still there and I can't believe it most days."

"Does it bother you--" Steve offered casually, giving them both a moment to recover--"that she seems to call everyone 'sport' at some point?"

"Nah. She's got other things she calls me that she ain't ever going to say to any of you." Clint grinned at them both. 

"'Faster' and 'harder' are not nicknames, Clint," Tony pointed out.

"I'm going to tell her you said that," Clint retorted.

"Remember I'm the guy with the money and that's all going to go away if she murders me in my sleep."

"Tony, come on," Clint chided him, "She'd never attack you when you couldn't defend yourself. She'd want to see the expression on your face when she killed you."

"Hawkeye?" Jarvis broke into the conversation. "I have a voice message for you from Mockingbird."

Clint looked over at his phone in confusion. "She didn't call though."

"She recorded it before she left and advised me that if she had not texted me a safe code every hour after her flight arrived in Atlanta I should play it for you. It has now been sixty minutes and 45 seconds since her last text."

Clint dropped his head to the table. "Of course. Of course she did. Play it, please."

Her voice was clear, her words crisp and smooth. If nothing else, she wasn't frightened.

"Clint, hopefully you never hear this. Hopefully I didn't lie to you and I'm just going to Atlanta to talk to Dr. Calvin and get my old research. But I'm currently putting it at 70% that this is a trap. You see, when I thought about it there were only two prisons Fury could have locked Paul in that I wouldn't be able get at him; they were both cleared out by HYDRA when SHIELD went down. My gut tells me he's out and he needs Project Gladiator to stop the people who wanted to kill him before from following through. He threw that data out into the world to fish for me and it makes sense that Dr. Calvin's the hook. 

If you get this message, tell Stark to grab the surveillance feeds from near the Bioengineering building at Georgia Tech. That way you'll know what happened. I have my new batons with me; no guns. I'll fight but I have no idea what kind of resources he's going to bring to bear; if he has an ounce of sense he'll have gone groveling back to what's left of A.I.M. I know Andrew Foreson--he took over when Killian died--he's canny, smart and a sociopath. He'll have given Paul enough rope to hang himself with and they'll both want me alive. I judged it better to bring them out in the open now by coming alone than risking they notice I'm traveling with the Avengers."

Bobbi's voice changed, became teasing. "Come rescue me, sport."

Clint looked over at the calendar when it stopped which was of the "Firemen of New York". Tony had bought it for Nat and she replaced it on the wall every time one of the guys removed it. "Nine days. Better than I thought." He sighed and sat back, rubbing his face.

Steve stared at him. "What do you mean?"

"It took her nine days after we got married to do something that made me want to _beat her to death_. I didn't think we'd get more than a week. So--should we leave her to her own devices? I vote yes and we all go out clubbing or something."

"Clint," Steve said in a withering tone, then tapped the "All Call" button on his phone. "Avengers, Assemble."


	11. The More Things Change...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back to the beginning for Mockingbird

Bobbi closed her eyes and leaned up against the wall of the windowless van Paul's goons had thrown her into when the plane landed. The hand cuffs were pretty tight and her shoulder still ached from fighting Steve; she tried to find a position that jarred it the least when they went over potholes.

There were a _lot_ of potholes, this was apparently not a well travelled route. Paul was sitting in the passengers seat--she had closed her eyes because he kept looking back at her and if she caught him staring one more time she was going over the six guys between them and severing his carotid arteries with her teeth.

Fun, yes, but ultimately pointless and likely to result in a bullet to the head. The guys--all guys--in the van had the look of small time thugs rejected by every other avenue for letting out their violent tendencies. Not respectable enough for the army, not tough enough for a gang, not smart enough for organized crime. Wannabe wannabes. 

They'd surrounded her back on campus, coming in fast when Paul went skipping back from her baton like he'd been grafted onto a kangaroo, tripping and falling on his ass which was all the saved him. Most of them had guns, poorly concealed under jackets too heavy for the weather but one was carrying a grenade fairly openly and that was what had stopped her. She didn't put it past Paul to have ordered the guy to blow up civilians. She had dropped her hand and laid the metal cylinder against her leg. It would look harmless and out of play there--in truth she could strike with it just as swiftly and effectively as from any other position. 

Paul had stood up, red-faced and furious, looking around and seeing that they were starting to draw attention. He stalked over to her, snarling. "You come quietly, Barbara, or you'll regret it."

"I regret not shooting you in the head the day I met you," she said, then nodded at the goon with the hand grenade. "Tell him to put that away."

"After we search you," Paul snapped, then gestured at the Bioengineering building again. "Over there."

Bobbi nodded and smiled, then walked to the entrance he'd indicated. It was a small foyer in front of a set of stairs, empty and sheltered from outside view. One of the goons put a gun to the back of her head and another one pulled off her jacket, running his hands up and down her sides, checking her legs and under her arms. If she'd had all her gear, he would have missed upwards of seven separate weapons but he did cop a feel of her boobs and ass.

"You guys need any pointers? Cause you're clearly not getting good training at 'mindless goon central casting'," she said mildly. One of them hit her on the back of the neck with the butt of his gun and she went down, stunned for a moment. Then they cuffed her hands behind her. Another one picked up her leather jacket, went through the pockets, found her wallet and tucked into his shirt, found the other baton still in its holster.

"Damn it," she snarled, shaking her head from the pain. "Don't mess with those, they're custom Starktech."

Paul perked up, looking over from where he'd making sure no one was watching them. He seemed to have missed the prominent surveillance camera in the corner of the alcove. "Starktech? Where did you get Starktech?"

"From Tony Stark, moron, where else?" She winced, then looked up and away from him. His face got a calculating look.

"You stole it. You stole it from Cross Industries, didn't you? I know you were there." He shook his head. "You're a terrible liar, Barbara." 

"Not as bad as you," she retorted. 

"Give me those," Paul gestured at the man, taking both her jacket and her wallet--given up reluctantly but obediently. These guys were more afraid of Paul than they should have been. Interesting.

"I'll take a look at all of this later, if it's actually Starktech it'll be worth some money. I'll make sure you all get a cut," he said.

Bobbi dropped her head down like she was in pain, fighting hard to conceal her smile.

That had been about six hours ago. Forty five minutes to some little private airfield, hour and half on the plane and now this bumpy, smelly, tedious van ride. At least Paul had moved out of the back. He'd tried to talk to her, once they were all settled in. She'd never realized he was such a _whiner_. 

Jail was awful...his life was ruined...all her fault...yadda yadda yadda.

She'd kicked him in the shin hard enough to bruise bone and he'd slapped her...but then moved to the passenger seat, leaving her in peace. She'd managed to nap a little even.

There was some chatter on the radio and the van slowed, then rumbled over a bridge and stopped. The van door slide open and she was hauled out into a big open space, awash with bright lights and scurrying people. At the edges of the illumination, dense wet foliage crept inwards, biding its time till it could devour this wound in its integument again. She remembered that smell: moss, stagnant water, rotting vegetation.

The Everglades. Project Gladiator.

"Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose," she muttered. "I shoulda known." She'd have kicked herself if she could. Of course this was the source of the data. She could have had Iron Man and Thor nuke it from orbit and be back at the Nest right now, with Hawkeye kissing his way down her torso en route to the really fun stuff.

Steve was going to sigh and look at her in disappointment when she told him about this. Her toes were curling up just thinking about it.

She looked to her left, knowing what she would see: a burnt out building, the top floors collapsed, surrounded by the rusted and nearly obliterated remnants of a barbed wire fence. She could see the hole Ted Sallis' jeep had made when he busted through it to cover her escape. Outbuildings were covered in creeper and mould and growing things in unhealthy colors. Some of the bustling people--most of them actually--appeared to be clearing the building, shoring up the sides and hauling dirt. There was heavy duty construction equipment scattered around the work site, hauling and dredging. An open marquee tent in army surplus green was covering an extra large hole in the ground just to the side of building. If she remembered correctly, that was the side the underground lab where the project head, Dr. Wendell, had extended her office into.

Her stomach clenched. What if Wendell had been keeping backups of the data and experiments outside of the secured lab? Strictly verboten and probably not intended to help anyone but herself--but well within her amoral "I'm just here for the science" nature. She'd evaporated after the Project went up in flames, dead or so scared she was still running, Bobbi had never been able to figure it out. But maybe she'd stopped running recently, with the power vacuum created when SHIELD went down, and fetched up at AIM's doorstep.

It was starting to look like Ted had been the only fucking person in the building without an ulterior motive for being there.

The physical samples would be totally degraded now. Most likely. She hoped. Desperately. 

The goons grabbed her and dragged her over to the tent in Paul's wake. There were lots of work lights set up around the open hole and the sound of power tools and working men. Next to a large table a stool had been set up and she was shoved onto it. Bobbi settled herself and looked around. 

They were definitely excavating Wendell's office so she had to assume the data came from there. Paul had gone over to one of the outbuildings, a new trailer that they must have brought in as an office and come back out with a tail of about eight men. Seven were of the big dumb goon variety but one was small, lithe, walking with the light balance of a runner or a dancer. As she got closer, she saw that he was hispanic, his plain face riddled with pock-marks and things that looked like acne scars.

They weren't; they were chemical burns. She had similar ones on her forearms and backs of her hands.

Paul led him over to her, then stepped up and slapped her again.

"What the hell man? You don't just hit the interrogation subject for no reason, not right away. You try to negotiate first, _then_ do the violence, gods you just suck at _everything_ don't you Paul?" Bobbi shook her head, her tone offended. "I must have had brain damage when I was younger."

"Shut up. Keep your mouth shut while you can. You'll be goddamn singing soon enough," Paul snarled at her, then turned to the small man, who was eyeing Bobbi like she was a baked good and he was starving. "She's the one who hit all those AIM bases, the one on the video they showed me. She was also the teachers pet around here, buttering up Wendell and Calvin. If anyone can recreate the project, it's her. Then I can make it work."

"You are sure, Nabo?" The little man's voice was weirdly deep, almost a bass drone. He sounded hyped up somehow anyway, speaking a little too fast, like he was over-dosing on caffeine.

Bobbi laughed, an involuntary explosive noise. The men both looked at her in angry surprise. Some of the goons apparently understood too because a swift wave of tittering ran through the crowd.

"He doesn't know what the means, does he?" she said to the small man in fluent Spanish. She snickered at his guilty start.

"Stop laughing Barbara. I need to introduce you to the man who's going to make you tell the fucking truth for once in your life," Paul ground out through clenched teeth. 

"Him?" she gestured at the small man with one shoulder. "I know him.

With a smile, she went on, speaking directly to him in a clear, carrying tone.

"Your name is Leandro Ruiz, you're an Argentine national; you specialize in chemical interrogation. You call yourself 'Verdad' because you think it's clever. You're also a psychopath, who likes to kill people with slow poison and watch them die, currently wanted for murder in every South or Central American country and about half of Europe. You're a coward as well -- you've run out on or betrayed _every single person you've ever worked for_ including your own family. Kept you alive but it's terrible for repeat business, which is why you're now shilling for a shattered and disgraced terrorist organization with delusions of science. Missed anything?" She smiled sweetly at him and the blank, horrified expression on his pock-marked face.

She looked over at Paul. "You do know he has orders to kill you? No matter what the outcome of this? AIM was founded by a vengeance obsessed sociopath and I think the current management takes after Daddy. They won't let you live, after you betrayed them. I'm slightly shocked no one shot you in the head as soon as you got back here with me." She looked at Verdad. "Do your masters think he had some special connection to me? Or that seeing him again I'd throw myself and his feet and beg to be taken back...."

Verdad's hands clenched. Bobbi grinned, incredulously.

"Oh, man, did he tell you I was still in love with him or something? That's so--" She doubled over on the stool, laughing so hard she started to cough. 

Paul leapt at her, grabbing her by the throat and pulling her up, screaming into her face, flying spittle making her blink. " _Stop laughing at me, you cold, unnatural bitch! I'm valuable here! They need me!_ " He drew back a fist and punched her in the stomach.  
Bobbi's only reaction was to stop laughing. She smiled at him. "Do that again, Paul."

He hit her again. She made a slight _oof_ noise. 

"Again, sparky. Put some muscle into it this time."

He hit her a third time and for a third time got no real reaction. He stopped, staring at her in confusion.

Bobbi's smile would not have looked out of place on a Great White Shark as it arrowed up from the sea floor towards its prey. "I'm a little sturdier now than I used to be, Paul. Over a decade of training does that for you. I'm glad though--my husband hits me harder than that by accident when we're fucking."

"Husband?" Paul grabbed at that thread like a life line.

"Yeah, you might know him. He's called 'Hawkeye' in the media."

Bobbi slammed her heel down onto Paul's instep and backflipped away from him, over the stool. When she straightened up her hands were in front of her. She held them up.

"Hey hey, I surrender," she said in a casual voice.

There was an evil humming noise, like ten thousand killer bees descending on the tent and the two big goons flanking Verdad fell over screaming with black-shafted arrows sticking out of their shoulders. 

The third arrow had neatly severed the short chain on Bobbi's handcuffs, which popped open in protest and slithered down her arms. "Wow, you guys buy the cheap shit, hey?" she remarked casually. Bobbi leaned over and pulled her batons out of her jacket sleeves.

"And there he is now to say hi. Look, he brought our housemates."

A bolt of lightening turned the largest excavator into a slag heap of burning metal and diesel; the doppler whine of Iron Man's flight repulsers passed over head and one side of the derelict lab collapsed under a missile strike.

From the edge of the swamp, three figures loped into the clearing: a tall man with shield, a lithe figure in black and a man wielding a bow. They split off in three directions, the woman in black instantly disappearing into the shadows, the man with the shield breaking towards the largest group of thugs, just jumping up from the table they'd been sitting at.

The man with the bow took shot after shot as he ran at a full sprint towards the tent. Bobbi back flipped again, into a full hand spring layout that took her behind a pile of crates. The remaining goons with Paul and Verdad had drawn their guns and she didn't fancy getting shot when she wasn't wearing body armor. 

Hawkeye landed next to her, rolled onto his back and shot two more of the AIM workers who were trying to flank Captain America. There was a flash of blue light off amongst the other construction equipment. Natasha had found a few targets. 

Bobbi popped her head up over the crates and then dropped back down to her knees. Hawkeye looked up just then and their eyes met. He was in full battle mode so his expression was cool, calm, slightly sardonic--then Hawkeye slipped away for a breath and it was Clint staring at her, searching for signs of injury. His eyes were full of love and relief and a depthless anger.

He opened his mouth, snarling over the noise of explosions, screams and the particular thin whirring of Cap's shield whenever he threw it. 

"Steve's approved the shock collar!"

She had never loved him more than that moment. 

Bobbi laughed, high and joyful and gestured towards the white van still sitting next to the rusted fence. "What? You don't like your wedding present?"

Clint looked over and saw Paul Allen scrambling on his stomach in the mud, headed for the vehicle.

"Oh, little bird, you shouldn't have. Really, _you shouldn't have_."

"I know, sport. Go get'im though. I'm going hunting for the truth."

Another look over the crates confirmed Verdad had fled back towards the building. Bobbi locked her batons together, extended them and deked right, away from the crates, A small backhoe was between her and his line of retreat. She dropped her head, ramping up to a sprint in a few strides, slammed the butt of the pole (now taller than she was) into the ground and vaulted smoothly into the air, over the equipment. She dropped down in front of him like she'd fallen from heaven, all golden hair and bright predator smile.

He screamed, shrilly, and ran straight into the swamp, crashing through the thick brush like a panicked rhino. Bobbi cursed and charged in after him, slightly more cautiously. 

*****

"I should have killed her, dumb bitch, this whole thing is her fault, her fault, I did everything right, where did she meet the Avengers, god damn it..." Paul was muttering wildly as he crawled through the mud, terrified to stand up. There was lightening and arrows and Iron Man and...a roar echoes through the trees and huge cypress tree flew straight up into the air on the other side of the clearing. 

"The Hulk! She brought the Hulk! Oh, god, Foreson is going to kill me, oh god oh god oh god..." he scrambled up into the van and jammed the keys in the ignition. He ground the starter for a moment and then the ignition caught and he threw it into gear. 

Then he looked up and saw the man with the bow standing in the headlights. 

The blond man smiled and waved. Paul gunned the engine, tires spinning for a second in the mud and then leaping forward. The archer stepped casually to the side and fired a single arrow into the engine block. The van died in a welter of steaming and screaming flybelts.  
Paul hit his head on the steering wheel as the engine cut out, then stared out into the darkness. The man was gone, had he hit him? Was he--

The driver side window exploded under Hawkeye's fist.

Paul was dragged out through the falling glass and thrown against the side of the van. The blond man facing him was a few inches shorter than him but might as well have been seven feet tall from the fear on the scientist's face.

"Hi, Dr. Allen. We have something in common." Hawkeye had a companionable smile plastered on his face.

"Barbara? You're Hawkeye--you married the bit--"

There was an arrow jammed up under his jaw, snapping him into silence. He hadn't even seen the other man move. 

"Her name is Bobbi. There's no other word starting with 'b' you should use to describe her."

Paul nodded tightly, a wet spot spreading on the crotch of his pants. 

"Dr. Allen, I'd like you to know that hitting educated bad guys makes me feel like a bully," Hawkeye said in a polite tone.

Paul relaxed.

Then Hawkeye dropped down, his knees bending and his left hand traveling upwards, generating power from his toes all the way to the first two knuckles of his fist. And his frame could generate a lot of power when he needed it too; this was a man who could hold a bow with a 250lb draw at full extension without so much as a tremble. 

It was the most viscerally satisfying punch of his life.

"But what can I do? Reject a wedding gift?" 

Paul's jaw shattered like the window of the van and the blow continued upwards to crunch his nose into a bloody mess. The back of his head hit the van's side and he slide down it to sit on the ground, clutching his face and making garbled inarticulate noises. Hawkeye shook his fist, feeling the ache of a popped knuckle shift back into place, then leaned down and jammed the loose arrow through Paul's left calf muscle to keep him from running away.

"Don't try to pull that out, you might bleed to death. Be a good boy and sit quietly till we're done kicking the crap out of the rest of these guys."

*****

Captain America caught his shield on a particularly good rebound (two trees, a piece of equipment and then a quick skip off the ground, mowing down about five thugs in the process) and looked around. Iron Man was cruising up high, picking off anyone who tried to escape down the road; Black Widow had the left side of the clearing under control. Thor and the Hulk were tossing armed men left and right near the back of the complex, where the outbuildings gave some of them cover. 

Hawkeye had made a bee line for his wife, who seemed to be in fine fettle. They hadn't been able to hear everything she was saying to Allen and the little hispanic guy who seemed to be in charge--Iron Man's pickups weren't _that_ good at a distance--but once he'd heard 'chemical interrogation' he'd ordered them in.

He saw Mockingbird make a gesture towards a white van and then Hawkeye popped up and ran over to it while she turned those batons of hers into a pole and...

...vaulted over a backhoe.

Like it was nothing. He'd heard Clint talking about her weapons skills, he'd seen her evaluation, he'd sparred her and he was still impressed.

She was after the little guy, the one called 'Verdad'. Steve rose up and ran towards her, still in all this the unknown quantity. His nature was to believe she needed protection, despite what experience had just shown him. But then he thought of all the other humans on the team--even Bruce when he wasn't Hulked out--as fragile and inherently defenseless without him. 

When both of them charged into the undergrowth, he followed, dodging Linnea and creepers, ducking around weirdly branching serpentine trees, slipping on moss. The air was rank and humid and he couldn't see more than a few feet in front of him. Once he went knee deep into a muddy sinkhole--if his costume hadn't been so well made he'd have lost a boot.

He shoved his shield through a wall of green...something slimy and hanging...and unexpectedly burst into a clearing in time to see Bobbi fling herself into the trees on the far side, dodging something Verdad had just thrown at her. The man was half-turned towards Steve and the super soldier's eyes registered his face: slack with terror, his mouth working like he was praying.

Verdad howled in terror at the sight of Captain America and flung up his hands. Somethings--at least three objects--he'd been holding in one of them zipped through the air and struck Steve on the side of the neck, stinging like swarm of wasps. Steve shook his head and bounded forward to crack the man in the face with his shield.

Mid-step, his knees gave out. He fell flat out, like a cut tree, managing to turn his shoulder into the ground to protect his face at the last second. Even that slight motion felt like he was incased in lead, his lungs burning, his heart skipping in his chest. Steve tried to shove himself up and was instead rolled over onto his back. Verdad loomed over him, the terror in his eyes now competing with triumph.

"It will be enough to show, if I kill Captain America! They will have to let me live!" His hand came down, a metal dart gleaming between his fingers, aiming for Steve's throat. Steve's arms twitched but would not obey him. He was a helpless as a gaffed fish, his throat working as he struggled just to breath.

Verdad's chest erupted, sprouting a thick greenish-brown growth. Thinking was hard but to Steve it looked like one of the hanging vines, strangely rigid, had been thrust through his torso from behind. He hung on the impaling branch for a moment, twitching like a puppet have a seizure and was then flung to the side, clearly dead.

Above him, silhouetted against the night sky, illuminated strangely by the burning complex on the other side of the trees, some... _thing_ loomed. Its great sloping head turned from the man it had just killed to the one lying prone on the ground, paralyzed.

Its huge multi-faceted eyes glowed ruby red with rage as it reached a blood soaked limb toward Captain America.

*****

"Hey, anyone seen Cap?" Iron Man said through the open channel as Thor and Hulk pounded back into the centre of the camp. Most of the thugs and AIM lackeys were down but a few were skittering around the edges of the swamp, stuck between the Everglades (dark, swampy, filled with snakes and alligators) and the Avengers (brightly colored, sweaty, well-armed). This would normally have been the point that Steve called everyone in to regroup and finished the clean up. But no one had seen him; or Mockingbird, as it turned out.

"You need to put a bell on that woman, Clint," Natasha said as Hawkeye hopped off the bucket of the excavator he'd been using as a sniper position.

"I suggested it to Steve days ago," he agreed. He opened his mouth to say something else when Iron Man's voice blared across the clearing, surprise and something close to panic in his tone.

"What the fuck is that?"

They all spun and peered into the darkness at the edge of the clearing.

A man-shaped...something plodded out of the undergrowth, looking like one of the trees had grown feet and decided to go for a stroll. It was massive, easily as tall as the Hulk though not as bulky, and covered in moss, creepers and vines. It had no neck and only the crude semblance of a face; most of that was covered in two huge eyes like pools of crimson jewels, insect-like. In the tricky light, they looked like they were glowing from the inside out. 

In its arms it was carrying Captain America.

Every weapon the Avengers had was leveled at the creature in the blink of an eye; thunder built in the air as Thor prepared to call his lightening.

Then Bobbi ran out from behind the thing...man...waving her arms and screaming:

"No! No! He's a friend! Please, he's a friend!"

She sprinted up to the group of Avengers and cut off Clint's demanded explanation, still-born.

"Verdad got him with four of his darts. The poison's trying to shut down his involuntary muscles: heart, lungs, all of it. Four's enough to kill even him!"

Iron Man cursed and landed next to her. "Let me take him, I can get him to Miami in ten minutes--"

"No! He'll die on the way. But I think we can save him. Stark analyze this--" She held out a broken dart, the central tube cracked open. "I think it's curare based." Stark clamped his hand around it, paused to commune with Jarvis, then nodded.

"Yeah, and a bunch of other stuff." He spat out a list of chemicals at high speed. Hulk perked up, his head going to one side like a dog, a low grumbling noise in his chest sounding almost like speech.

"Good. All that can be counteracted--but until then--" Bobbi looked around wildly, panic in her eyes. Clint reached out and pulled her into his arms. Her head went down on his shoulder for a beat and when it came back up Bobbi was gone and Mockingbird delivered crisp, calm orders in an even tone. 

"Lay him down on that table please," she said to the creature. Hulk was eyeing it like a lion sizing up a rival at the edge of his territory. Thor still looked ready to fry any branch that twitched in the wrong direction.

Mockingbird looked at Iron Man. "You are going to Miami, to the hospital I need--"and she spat out a rapid series of words that made no sense to anyone else but Stark seemed to understand. "Got all that?"

"Yeah," Iron Man's flight repulsers came on line. "Back in a jif."

"And the biggest, strongest syringe you can find," she added as he went from hover to full flight taking off east towards the city.

"Black Widow, Hawkeye you two are with me. Thor, Hulk, we can't be disturbed. You need to protect us until Tony gets back."

"Verily, my lady. We will stand as the walls of Asgard before you."

Hulk grunted assent, a deep animal rumble that echoed through the clearing. The two Avenger tanks took up position on either side of the tent, alert and ready to strike. 

Mockingbird went over to the creature, which had set Captain America down as gently as a kitten on the big wooden table, hastily swept of equipment and papers by Hawkeye. 

She reached up and touched the creature's face, what would have been its jaw, stretching high to lay the tips of her fingers against its pulsing brownish-green skin.

"Thank you," and now she wept openly, though her voice was steady. "Thank you for helping me save him, as I could not save you. I am so sorry."

The man...thing...seemed to nod just a little, stately. Its eyes gleamed like banked fires. A wave of emotion swept over the clearing.

Forgiveness. Acceptance. Gratitude.

It looked directly at Hawkeye, who jumped like he'd been goosed

Warning. Approval. Amusement.

It looked back at Mockingbird and touched her face in return with one tendril like finger.

Peace. Contentment. Completion.

Farewell.

It faded back into the swamp and in a breath was gone as though it had been a dream.

"What the hell?" gasped Black Widow, awe in her voice. "What was that?"

Mockingbird shook her head. "Long story, tell you later, right now we all have jobs to do."

"What?" snapped Hawkeye, shifting uncomfortably. 

"We're going to be Captain America's lungs--"she pointed at her herself and Widow--"and you get to be his heart, Hawkeye."

She pulled at Steve's limp form, getting his head right to the edge of the table, rolling her jacket into a pad for his neck. She tilted his head back a little, check his mouth, then gestured at Hawkeye to get up on the table.

"We need to do chest compressions on him and you're the only person on the planet strong enough do that without crushing his sternum," she said to Clint, who immediately went to his knees and put his hands in the right spot on Steve's chest, over the white star that centered his costume. They all knew basic first aid.

"It's supposed to be thirty and two, compressions to breaths, but we're going to have to keep this up for at least twenty minutes and that would kill even you, Clint. Fifteen and five, two sets from each of us, Widow and then the other one takes over. The one breathing counts for Hawkeye, the other person talks to him."

She reached down and touched Steve's eyelids. "He's conscious. He can't see--his eye muscles can't focus--but he can hear. He might be in pain, I don't know, I think so. We need to make sure he knows he's not alone, we're fighting for him." 

Leaning in, Mockingbird spoke directly into Steve's ear. "You hold on, Cap. We're getting help but you need to _hold on_. Clint, this isn't a race. Slow, steady, slower than you were trained. He can absorb more oxygen than a normal human so we don't have to circulate it as fast."

Black Widow nodded and brought her mouth to Captain America's ear, her face tense but her voice soft, warm, enticing. 

"Remember you said you trusted me to save your life? Well, I'm taking you up on that now...."

Hawkeye started to press downward in a smooth, rocking rhythm, his mouth open with effort, his eyes half closed, concentrating. Sweat started on his forehead almost instantly, as the super soldier's enhanced muscles and bones resisted his efforts. But he moved like a machine, without pause or complaint.

"Thirteen...fourteen...fifteen..." Bobbi counted. Clint raised his arms and she took a deep breath, leaned down, pinching his nose and laying her mouth over his. Even in this moment of terror and uncertainty, her lizard brain noticed that his lips were still warm, firm. He tasted of sweat and clean male. 

She breath out, slowly and steadily, emptying her lungs, willing every molecule of oxygen into his system, into his blood stream, imaging them as little knights in shining armor, beating back the necrotic effect of the toxins trying to kill him. She sat up, gasped in some air for herself, her head swimming, and then did it again and again and again and again. Somewhere behind her, she heard the Hulk roar in challenge and men screaming. 

Clint restarted the compressions and Mockingbird counted, seconds ticking away in her head, willing Iron Man to fly faster, return sooner.

They repeated the process and then Black Widow moved in to start her turn, Bobbi touching her lips to Steve's ear. "Come on, Stars and Stripes, you owe me another fight, with all our gear. I need to teach you that flying oma plata..."

It was twenty three minutes of hell. Of fear and exertion, of seeing spots from lack of oxygen and wiping drool away; of sweat pooling and slipping greasily under clothes, salt in the eyes, salt in the mouth.

And no pauses, no wavering. Effort and need, driven to the edge and then past it, to where the will was the only thing left.

The diamond-hard will of an Avenger.

Then Iron Man just dropped through the fabric of the tent ceiling rather than waste time walking in. He unfurled a bundle on the table next to Mockingbird, who was just ending her most recent mouth-to-mouth. Unspoken, she dropped back and Black Widow took her place. Hawkeye's face was set with pain, his arms shaking whenever he pulled them away but his rhythm was as steady as ever. 

Mockingbird and Iron Man barely spoke as she assembled a concoction of chemicals in the huge--clearly veterinary--syringe he'd brought. Once or twice he stopped her, checked his HUD and suggested a modification; she did what he said. Jarvis had been analyzing the poison the whole time he'd been flying; she trusted them both.

"Hawkeye, off," she ordered. 

He slide off the table feet first, unable to support himself with his arms, his breath coming in agonized gasps. Bobbi took his place, positioned the syringe over Captain America's heart, then stopped.

"It won't...I have to go through his chest plate into the muscle and I can't. Not strong enough, Hawkeye's done, Thor or Hulk would smash the syringe. Iron Man, you're going to have to drive it."

Tony's voice was a little distorted inside his helmet but his consternation was clear. "The suit'll break it too, even if I control it and I'm not half of Hunger Games there without it."

Mockingbird shook her head. "Not if it's got a cushion." She wrapped her left hand around the body of the syringe. 

"Mock, that'll mush your hand."

"Yeah, it will."

Iron Man nodded and stepped over. It was the only way and none of them were going to argue about it. Hawkeye touched his forehead to hers, still unable to raise his arms. Black Widow whispered into Captain America's ear, something low and intimate, then stepped back.

Iron Man closed his gauntlet over Mockingbird's hand and activated his hydraulics. The syringe snapped down, piercing the iron-hard muscles and bone, delivering its injection directly into Captain America's stunned and silent heart.

Mockingbird sobbed, once, her face a mask of endurance. When the gauntlet rose up again her hand was visibly a mess of broken fingers, already swelling and bruising. 

They all stared, breathless. Mockingbird fell back against Hawkeye, feeling him lay his head on her shoulder.

"Come on, buddy," Iron Man muttered. 

Mockingbird counted her own pulse, two three four five six, her soul starting to crumple with the knowledge of complete and perfect failure, a wail building in her chest that might explode her own heart.

Captain America convulsed, coughed...then rolled over and threw up in the mud, retching and choking, knocking the syringe loose as he turned. He vomited again, mostly liquid, then pushed himself up to a sitting position.

"That really hurt," he growled, his voice sounding raw and gruff. "And it tastes terrible."

Mockingbird turned her head into her husband's neck and wept until her eyes could not produce any more tears while Hawkeye vociferously protested not being able to hold her in his arms.


	12. Epilouge: Consequences. Endings. Beginnings.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here we are at the end of this little show. Hope you enjoyed it.

"This is really cool; times changed while I was squatting in shacks and running down rumours of secret labs," Bobbi remarked to Tony as they exited the elevator at Avengers tower. She was examining the fragile looking cast on her left hand: a lacy web of 3D printed polymer, bright red, encasing each digit and extending to the wrist. It formed a rigid cage, buzzing faintly against her skin. High frequency sound waves pulsed gently through her flesh, speeding the bone healing.

"Yeah, and the power pack is encased in the wrist band there, you can shower with it, hot tub, swim...get sweaty..." Tony threw her one of his dazzling "Aren't I awesome?" smiles. She poked him in the shoulder and laughed.

It was two days after the Project Gladiator debacle. Iron Man--bless his quick brain--had placed an emergency call to the re-re-branded War Machine on his way to Miami. Rhodey and the army had shown up half an hour after Captain America had started breathing again. Ironically, Steve was the only really chipper one in the group when their back up arrived.

Hawkeye had actually fainted--gone into severe hypoglycemic shock--about five minutes after he'd stopped giving CPR. Bobbi had held it together long enough to get sugar water and electrolyes into him then started to shake herself, her vision going has her body protested nearly half an hour of low oxygen/high extertion. Black Widow wasn't much better. Hulk's inner Bruce Banner had actually taken over at that point, the dark-haired, gentle faced man a little dazed at first but quickly focusssing to deal with his patients, lined up on the wooden table. Iron Man was patrolling the area, looking for stragglers (he'd already rescue four AIM lackeys from drowning/being eaten by alligators) so it was just the Aryan nation poster boys--as Bobbi had dubbed Thor and Captain America--conscious and walking around, corralling the goons.

Steve had instantly forbidden her to call him that ever again, before greeting War Machine and the army colonel warmly and appraising them of the situation. The colonel was a calm, efficient model soldier. She had brought a transport for the prisoners and was delighted beyond words when they presented her with fugitive-wanted-for-treason Dr Paul Allen as the capper.

One of the army medics gave the shirtless Bruce a jacket and started an IV drip on Hawkeye, who roused. Bobbi lay back on the table next to him and covered her eyes with her arm. They were muttering back and forth at each other, quick waspish statements that boiled down to "You're an idiot" "No, _you're_ an idiot", nearly pillow talk for them.

"We need to carry around a change of clothes for you," Black Widow had said to Bruce, her voice low and smokier than normal. Both she and Bobbi had started to spit blood a little, their throats raw. Bruce sat down next to her on one of the stools scatterd around. 

"I need one of those neat tactical go-bags you have, but with pants and underwear and sweaters rather than weapons," he agreed. He quirked his head at her. "When that...whatever that was with Captain...when it...did it sort of...speak?"

She nodded. "Not words, really. Emotions. It gave Hawkeye a brainfull of 'You hurt her--I'll kill you' so it seems to have a soft spot for Bobbi."

"He," Bobbi's throat sounded worse than Natasha's and she was speaking less. "That thing was a man. It..." Then she rolled over, curling up into a ball, unable to continue through the coughing and that was the last they got from her on the topic until they were all back in New York. 

Now she and Tony emerged onto the common floor of the Tower, brightly lit and covered wall to wall with decorations, in purple and dark blue. She'd just been sprung from the hospital--her hand had required a few hours of micro-surgery to collect and reset all the bone fragments--and she stopped, delighted and surprised.

A huge banner across from the main doors read "Congratulations, Bobbi and Clint!"

"We never threw you guys a wedding reception," Tony said, grinning at her.

"You did all this in two days?" Bobbi exclaimed. 

"I'm a billionaire, Mocks, I could make all this happen in two hours if I wanted."

"I think you mean 'I could tell Pepper to make this happen in two hours'," said the tall, elegant red-head who slide her arm into Tony's as he spoke.

"That is exactly what I meant," Tony responded smoothly. 

The room was packed with balloons, tables with food and bottles of champagne, a pile of wrapped presents. Thor and Jane foster were smiling at her from next to the chocolate fountain, the big Asgardian happily consuming marshmallows by the handful. Bruce was sitting on a couch with Natasha, both holding flutes of sparkling wine. Rhodey came up and clapped Tony on the back. He was trailed by the cool dark form that was Hill. Fury's former right hand quirked an eyebrow at Bobbi.

"Glad to have you back, Morse...Barton. It was a big blow to three separate departments when you went dark."

"Yeah. Terribly inconvienent for Logistics, my being falsely accused of treason and all that," Bobbi said in a clipped tone. Hill held up a hand.

"I know. And we should talk about it--but not now."

"Agreed."

Still ruffled, Bobbi turned to Tony. "I'm not dressed for this!" Everyone but him was in elegant party clothes, looking dapper and relaxed.

Natasha rose to her feet, smiling. "I have a dress for you in the next room, come." 

As she followed the Black Widow, Bobbi looked further around the space. "And where's Clint and Steve?" she asked, as Natasha opened the double doors to the meeting room.

"Hi, little bird," Clint said, stepping out to her right and wrapping his hand around her upper arm. Steve did the same on her other side. 

"Wha--" Bobbi exclaimed as they lifted her up simultaneously, till her feet were off the ground, and walked back through the living room towards the balcony, carrying her like a piece of furniture. She was still facing backwards, towards the end of the room.

"Ambush!" Bobbi yelled at Natasha, standing in the door way and laughing.

"I do have a dress, it's just they wanted to speak to you first," she choked out.

Bobbi looked from side to side, saw similar stony set faces and appealed to the rest of the room, her voice pleading. "Guys? Guys? Little help here?"

They all waved.

"I hate yo--" Bobbi's voice was cut off by the outside doors swinging shut.

Outside, Clint and Steve carried her to the far end of the warmly lit patio, next to the glass wall at the edge of the building. The pool was between her and the door and they flanked her, staring coldly. She shook herself, flustered.

Not too flustered too notice they both looked _sensational_. Clint was in crisp black jeans so classy and expensive they were practically dress pants and a deep blue t-shirt. Steve was wearing a white button down with the top two undone and dark brown kahkis. Both shirts worked to emphazise their respective build: Steve with the classic body-builder V, most of his muscle in his upper body and thighs. Clint lighter framed but so perfectly perportioned it took a while to notice just how massive his chest and arms were, how that flat hard muscle continued all the way down his torso.

Her libido started the clutch its chest and heave its bosom. 

She held up her cast. "Still injured. Can't defend myself."

Clint snorted. "I'm pretty sure you could take out a ninja squad with one arm tied behind your back, don't try the sympathy card with us, missy."

"Er," she gulped, feeling way more nervous than she would have expected. "What exactly is the problem?"

Hawkeye looked at Captain America and opened a hand to him: _after you_. 

Steve nodded. "I wanted to lay out for you just exactly how insanely unhappy I am--we are--the team is--that you pulled that...damned...stunt two days ago."

Bobbi opened her mouth to make a sarcastic crack and found her mind empty. The fact that Steve had just sorta sworn at her was far more emotionally disturbing than it had any right to be. She closed it again and nodded, feeling small and scared.

"It's not that you ran head-long into danager," he continued.

"Oh, I'm not too happy about that," Clint muttered underneath him.

"We all do that. It's that you put yourself in that kind of position without back up. Without any way to insure we'd be able to find you."

"I knew they'd bring the batons! I knew Stark had GPS in them! I turned it on!"

"And there's no way to detect that? Block it? Turn it off? Leaving you in the middle of an enemy camp, being tortured and drugged?"

"Yeah, well, Paul was an idiot that hadn't changed--"

"You changed."

"I'm--" she shut her mouth with a snap, then continued more slowly. "I'm a fucking moron. You're right, I was depending on my enemies being stupid. You plan for smart and stupid is a bonus. You're right." She sagged back against the railing, shaking her head. "My instincts for teamwork are shot. I've been stuck in 'can't trust anyone' mode for so long...I'm sorry, you're right."

"Stop apologizing to me. _But you have to do better._ "

She jumped and stared at him, shocked at the force and power in his words. A shiver went up her spine. _This_ was why Tony Stark deferred to this man; why Thor followed him in combat; why the Hulk obeyed. 

Why she would too. This was a leader who would lay his life down for his team and trust them to do the same. Who would not fall, or fail, or stop as long as someone needed him to stand, to fight, to press on. Anyone who could hold the calm centre of the controlled storm that was the Avengers was not friable rock to crumble or brittle iron to shatter.

This was a man who who stand between her and a howling void, holding his shield high until death took him.

Mockingbird raised her head and met Captain America's eyes steadily. "I will, Cap. I swear. I will be better; I will be perfect."

"That'll do, yeah." He looked at Clint, still glaring at his wife. "And you might not have to apologize to me but he's another matter."

"Do you..." Clint ground out when Steve yielded him the floor, "Have the. Slightest. Fucking. Idea. How. I. Felt. When I got that message?"

Bobbi looked down at her feet. "I can imagine..." She mumbled.

"What? Speak up."

"I can imagine," she said, her cheeks stinging as the blood rushed to them, "that you felt the same way I would feel if you announced you were about to jump off this patio." She stared at him, half defiant, half ashamed. 

"Horrifed. Terrifed. So angry I thought my head was going to explode. _And I couldn't even express it to anyone because we went straight into mission-mode._ I've been chewing on it for two days--that and a week's worth of antacid."

She winced. He stepped into her, dropping his face down to her level. "What we do is dangerous enough. You do not _ever fucking again_ go out of your way to make it more dangerous. You aren't alone any more little bird."

"I know, I know, I know," she whispered, her eyes wet.

He tilted her chin up, his fingers and eyes more gentle than this tone. "Try to remember if something happens to you now, you wreck more than one life. Mine would be over too."

"And mine," Steve said softly from behind him. "Lost too many people already. Not losing anyone else if I can help it."

Bobbi gulped and swallowed her tears. "I'm sorry. I was being arrogant and selfish and I think maybe proud. Like I wanted to prove I could play with the big kids."

"You beat me up, Bobbi. How many grades were you looking to skip?" Steve asked, his eyes glittering with laughter, then sobering. He and Clint were exchanging serious looks.

Bobbi stared at them both, appalled "What? What did I do now?"

Steve shifted, his face going blank. When he spoke he sounded embarrassed. "Actually, Bobbi, this one's on me--"

*****

"Geez, it's weird seeing Clint that serious for that long," Tony remarked.

They were all unashamedly staring out the windows at the patio, watching the interplay between the three blonds. Natasha--who could of course read lips--was giving updates when she could make out what they were saying.

"He was greatly distressed all the flight to Florida," rumbled Thor. "Did I not know his humors, I would be concerned he intended real harm to his lady wife."

"Wow, Steve's...wow, he's on form tonight," Natasha muttered. "I'm impressed she's not down on the ground in a puddle."

"She's pretty tough, from what Tony's been telling me. I'm sorry I didn't get to meet her sooner," said Pepper, refilling glasses around the group.

"Oh, Clint's in the ring now," Jane said, looking eager.

Natasha leaned forward, her lips moving, then jerked back like she'd gotten a shock. "Ow. Ow, Clint, ow, that's just..."

"What?" asked Bruce, who was the only one trying not to look like he was watching. 

"He just told her if anything happened to her, _his_ life would be over too."

"Owwww. True but....owwwwww."

"She's apologizing now, which is good. And...hmmm."

They all saw Steve's body language change, go tentative and sheepish. He spoke at length at Bobbi, who grew increasingly stonier.

"Steve just said 'eavesdropping',"

"Oh, so he's telling her about whatever it was he overheard that night," Tony said, speculating. Natasha threw him a disgusted look.

"Stark, come on, think about it. Something bad that happened to her when she was on the run, that she'd only want to tell her new husband reluctantly, serious enough that they'd be embarrassed to be overheard? What could that possibly be?"

Tony stared at her a moment, then his eyes went dark with understanding swiftly followed by anger. "If the guy's still alive and we ever catch him, do we all get to cut off a piece?"

The sentiment ran around the room to general approval. 

"For the love of god, do _not_ let her know you figured it out," Bruce said urgently as the door opened and Steve came back in, looking like someone had thrown scalding water in his face.

"Well that was...enjoyable," he said, heaving a sigh.

"You earned it, Capsicle."

"I know. And she took her dressing down like a soldier. I could at least bite the bullet and tell the woman who saved my life that I'm a heel."

He snagged and empty glass and took a slug of the champange, then glared at the bottle. "It would be nice to get at least a little buzz off of this." 

"The calories are still good for you," Bruce reminded him, refilling both their glasses. 

Natasha turned and looked outside again. Steve had left Bobbi and Clint hugging by the pool. Bobbi was now sitting on one of the tables with her legs wrapped around Clint's waist and her shirt riding half up her back.

Tony opened the door and yelled at them: "Do you mind? No porn out in the open where people can _film it_."

The Bartons dragged themselves inside, both looking flustered and distracted--Natasha, Pepper and Jane pulled Bobbi into the conference room, giggling like teenagers. 

Clint, glass in hand, looked around the room like he was seeing it for the first time. "Thanks for this, Stark. I doubt we'll ever get time for a honeymoon but she deserves a nice party."

"I've got this property in Vermont, off a private ski hill, bunch of little cabins. We should all go up for a bit in the winter."

They all looked at Steve, in the middle of inhaling a cheese puff. He blinked at them, crumbs on his face. "Sure. Sounds like fun." 

Clint and Tony exchanged a glance. "Do you think he knows what that word means?" Clint stage-whispered.

"He's probably using some archaic thirties definition that means 'work! work hard!'."

Steve was eyeing them balefully, preparing some retaliation, when the conference room door swung open. Natasha emerged leading Bobbi, pulling her forward and then sending her towards her husband as though shaking a falcon from her wrist.

Bobbi looked stunning, wearing a silver party dress with a pleated skirt and corset bodice; it made her waist look tiny and her breasts about three times bigger than normal. She glided on sparkling slippers to Clint, her face radiant. The rest of the room broke out into spontaneous applause.

They made a lovely picture, the archer and the stick fighter, both golden and glowing in the warm light and the warmer company. 

When everyone was back together and had a glass of something in their hand, Tony raised his hand. 

"I'm not going to make a big speech, not my thing. But I wanted to say, welcome to the Tower, Bobbi. Welcome to our lives. And there's a new dark blue Ducati downstairs next to the Harleys and Clint's street bike. Congrats on the wedding, even if your taste in groom was a little strange." They all laughed. He looked at Clint. "You, though, Legolas, I hope you realize how lucky you got. Don't try to swim with that horseshoe in your underwear."

They all toasted the couple one by one, with kind words and bawdy jokes, humor and sincerity, until it worked itself around to Steve, the last to speak. He stood tall and stern, looking angelic and serious and thoughtful.

"I was talking to Natasha yesterday, hashing out the whole situation with you, Bobbi. Thinking about what happened in Florida. And we came to this conclusion: there's no plan, no scheme you could be running that wouldn't have been easier if I was dead. So either you are running the longest, most convoluted con in human history...or you are now what you've always been."

He stopped. "You could have left me out there to die. You could have left me to be killed by that..thing--"

Bobbi cut him off. "I think that thing might have been Ted Sallis," she said softly. "When I threw myself over you, he looked at me and he was so angry. Violated. Scared. Something he was protecting was in danger. Then he...recognized me. He seemed...relieved. Whatever  
happened, the formula, the chemicals, the fire, they didn't make him a super soldier--they made him something else. Something that found a purpose out there in that swamp."

She raised her glass. "To Dr Ted Sallis, who saved my life at the beginning of Project Gladiator and Captain America's life at the end."

"To Ted Sallis." They all intoned. 

Steve smiled at her, his face transforming into something younger, and kinder. The boy he'd been rather than the man he was.

"Jarvis, run that recording, will you?"

The big TV on the wall flickered to life, showing the out skirts of the Everglades site, fires still brurning behind the wall of trees. The Avengers quinjet was sitting in a cleared space: Natasha and Bruce were just disappearing into it; Clint and Bobbi, draped dramatically over one another followed soon after, with Thor trailing them like a sheepdog, watching in case either of them fell. In the foreground, Captain America and Iron Man were facing a male reporter.

"Captain Rogers, Mr. Stark! Can you tell us what's happening here?"

"You'll have to ask the colonel. The army has quarantined the area -- the old installation here is pretty unstable and possibly contained unsafe chemicals. We suspect that's what the terrorists from AIM were after; we were here chasing them," Steve responded, telling the truth for a certain value of truth. He leaned in to Iron Man, said something inaudible--Tony nodded and lumbered towards the quinjet. He'd have to fly it home, since Clint still couldn't move his arms. 

The reported hand his hand to his ear, listening, then looked at Steve.

"Captain, can you at least tell us who the blond woman was who just got on the plane? No one's ever seen her before."

Steve had half turned away, headed to the jet, but he looked back at the question.

"Her name's Mockingbird." He turned full into the camera, standing tall. "She's an Avenger."

The recording froze.

Steve raised his glass to Bobbi and Clint and everyone mirrored him. 

Bobbi's face was still but her eyes were depthless, filled with love and trust. Clint's open, honest face was even more expressive: just pure joy.

"Welcome to the Avengers, Mockingbird."


End file.
